


A New Order

by abeaufortinnewyork



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Slow Burn, Space Virgins in Love, angst is everywhere, anyway, but also space virgins with ~desires~, but also trying to be realistic, force ghosts abound, i mean if episode ix were produced by HBO ;), romantic tension between rey and my naughty nephew, this is basically my dream for episode ix
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-02-28 01:19:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 22,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13260591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abeaufortinnewyork/pseuds/abeaufortinnewyork
Summary: “This thing between us,” she whispers, like she’s afraid of it. “It’s stronger now.”It’s true. The mattress — a whole galaxy away, thin and worn on some abandoned Rebel base — gives gently beneath him now, and his skin cools at a damp breeze that flits in from the window. And she, crystal-clear and exquisite before him, is alive and infinite in the Force.“I feel you,” she says, and voice drops lower still. “Like I’m inside of you. Like — it’s my blood in your veins, and your heart in my chest.”But her brow furrows worriedly when she says it, and her eyes flicker with a shadow of fear — fear and something else. He’d called it curiosity once, and now he thinks it must be, because there is a question hovering on her lips: Why have I always felt you?Kylo’s chest aches, and he wonders how much longer he’ll be able to bear this — bear her, with her eyes the green of forests and heart the strength of kyber. “I know,” he answers, dropping his voice to match hers. “I feel it, too.”





	1. Chapter 1

Rey rises with the sun.

She takes her staff, slings a patchwork bag over her shoulder, and heads into the rich, overgrown heart of the forest. It calms her to see the rising sun crest the horizon, the soft, pinkish light of early morning filtering gently through the tight-knit canopy of leaves — of lush, flowering _green_.

The green astounds her. She’d thought Takodana an earthly paradise, surely the greenest planet in the galaxy, but somehow Arbra is better. The forest floor is carpeted all with moss, moist and rich, and a thousand vines curl eagerly through the treetops. At the forest’s edge a young mountain range bursts forth from the earth, its jagged peaks washed gold in the sun.

Rey likes the mountains. There is a still, quiet majesty to them, a lonely strength in which she sees, in her own curious way, a natural mirror of herself. The Arbran range is spotted through with caves, peaceful alcoves where she climbs to meditate and train.

They’d settled here five months ago, after Crait. “There’s a forest world not far from here,” General Organa had said aboard the Falcon. “Undeveloped, uninhabited. Arbra. It once served the Rebel Alliance well.” She’d pulled up a hologram of the planet, smiled at the sigh of appreciation and relief that the image elicited from the wearied crew. “Of course the First Order know this, and they’ll find us there eventually. But it will work. For now.” And as her thin band of survivors had welcomed this hope of reprieve, the General had hung her head, sighed. Only then, in that fleeting moment of manifest weakness, had Rey understood the depth of Leia’s strength. In her story there was an ironic cruelty to the way history repeated itself, to the way she was drawn twice into an existential conflict for the safety and prosperity of the galaxy — first against her father, and now against her son.

Rey tries not to think about Leia’s son.

She huffs and, with an almost ferocious determination, sets herself to climbing.

\--

The Supreme Leader sits in council, surrounded by the ranking officers of the First Order. The Knights of Ren, his faithful liegemen, are there too, clad all in black and thoroughly disinterested in the administrative and mundane military duties of their master.

Nor is the master himself much enthused. With a sigh he surveys the round of councillors. Only Hux has lifted a finger. The droid attending him announces, in a crawling monotone, “The Supreme Leader will hear General Hux.”

The general stands. “Supreme Leader. It has been some five months since our victory at Crait. In the intervening time we have done nothing to find and destroy the remnants of the Resistance.”

Kylo feels something twinge in his chest. He fixes Hux with a pointed stare. “The Resistance is decimated. Skywalker is dead.”

“But his sister lives,” says Hux. “And the _girl_.” His lips curl with hatred around the word. “They are both sensitive of the Force.”

“Do not presume, General,” Kylo intones sharply, tightening his fingers into a fist, “to lecture me about the ways of the Force.”

The spark of fury in Hux’s eyes is rudely drowned in a wave of fear. “I… I w-would n-never presume, Supreme Leader, to do anything of the sort! But your power — your supremacy — is threatened so long as the Resistance lives.”

“And you would snuff them out?”

“Wipe them out, sir.”

“How?”

Hux smiles cruelly. “I have overseen the creation of a task force to map all the bases used by the Rebel Alliance in the Imperial period. By our count there are thirty-seven, scattered throughout the galaxy. Our algorithms suggest that the most likely candidate for the rebels’ current location is Cardooine, to which a squadron of bombers will shortly be dispatched to destroy the base. After Cardooine the next most likely is Jagomir, which will also be bombed — and so on, and so on, until they are all destroyed.”

“And how will you know when you have found them?”

“I believe _you_ will know, sir.”

Kylo surges to his feet, searing with rage at the general’s presumption. How _dare_ he treat the Force as such a crude, vulgar thing! He wants to crush his neck between his own two hands, choke the life out of him with his own flesh and blood and bodily vigor. But he can’t, not unless he has a better plan — and he doesn’t.

If Hux can see the rage in Kylo’s eyes, there is nothing in his appearance to suggest it. “Supreme Leader,” he says, his voice lilting with arrogance, “do I have your authorization to proceed?”

Kylo closes his eyes. He sees her face and his mother’s, consumed by flame.

“Yes.”

Later he removes to the throne room, settles into the great black chair. It’s carved from the volcanic rock of Mustafar, and once, in his foolishness, he’d thought a clever and fitting homage to his grandfather. Now his memory rumbles with Snoke’s voice: _You’re just a child in a mask_.

His fists curl. He ought to be satisfied. He has revenged himself upon his uncle, upon his whole wretched family. The Jedi are lost to the dusts of history. And he has submitted the entire galaxy to his will, attained such heights of power as even eluded Lord Vader.

But Kylo Ren feels no satisfaction. No victory is his, no longed-for fulfillment.

He is hollow.

\--

Rey busies herself with the lightsaber.

“Rose can help you, you know,” Finn had said, months ago. “She’s good with mechanics.”

Rey had only stared at him. “It’s a _lightsaber_ , Finn.”

“Yeah, so what? It’s got a power grid, just like any other—”

“But the power comes from a kyber crystal.” She’d tilted her chin and said it with pride, as if she alone, heiress of the Jedi, knew how to handle a kyber crystal. But she is still untrained, and the great tomes of Jedi wisdom she’d taken from Ahch-To — the texts by which she thought to complete her training — are written in a language she does not understand.

Still she tries. And even when she fails, the illustrations, few as they are, are guidance enough. She’s managed by now to take the saber apart entirely, to lay out all its pieces and wires, to press the kyber crystal against her skin and feel, through the Force, its power.

It is the crystal that frustrates her most. Even when her soul is entirely at peace, when the cave is bathed in warm, glowing sunlight, and she moves through the Force, manipulating the energy around her to bring the halves together, they resist.

Her heart tightens when she remembers how the saber was even broken at all. A storm of rage and regret and sorrow swells within her, and as she trembles on the verge of tears she sees his face in her mind's eye - upturned, pleading, as she last saw it on Crait. _Crait._ She forces herself to remember how mercilessly he destroyed what remained of the Resistance, how he took Luke, as he'd taken Han and thousands of others. 

She hates him. The luxury of certainty has, like so many other luxuries, long evaded her. But now, at last, she can say with dazzling, absolute, uncanny certainty that she hates Kylo Ren. _You hated him on Starkiller_ , says a quiet voice, from deep in the recesses of her memory. _You hated him when he killed Han Solo. But in the hut on Ahch-To, you saw his future — and yours_. “No,” she grumbles aloud. "I hate him still."

Outside, the wind howls violently, as if to reproach her. 


	2. Chapter 2

He is drowning.

 _Up,_ echoes a distant voice — his own. _Up, swim up_. 

The water gives way, and with a forceful kick of his legs he breaches the surface. A cave gapes open, jagged and hollow, over his head. He’s seen it before, a hundred times — no, a thousand. The air is cool and silent.

He scrambles to his feet and stands, suddenly dry, before a glassy sheet of rock. Behind it moves _someone —_ a shadowy figure, its outline barely perceptible, but familiar. He reaches out and lays his fingers one by one against the rock, shifting coolly with blues and grays.  _Let me see._

“Let me see him,” he hears. Her voice.

The glass melts and she falls into his arms.

\-- 

Rey wakes in a fit of panic, her chest heaving and gleaming with sweat. The air around her hums with energy, and outside she hears the distant roar of thunder. _Rey._ His voice echoes so loudly, so clearly in her head that for a moment she fears that he’ll appear before her, that their bond will tear open again, as rudely as ever. 

But when she looks up, it’s Finn she sees on the threshold. 

His face is grim, his lips set in a tight line. “It’s Leia,” he says.

Without a word Rey follows him to the makeshift med bay, where Leia, all in white, lies still in a rusting cot. Poe is there, hunched over her body, the crown of his forehead pressed desperately against her hand. “No,” he’s whispering, the words coming fierce and low. “No, no, please, Leia. Please.”

Rey feels the color drain from her face. “What happened?”

General Organa had been ailing for weeks, but to the men and women under her command, her fatigue and frailty had seemed little more than the natural consequence of old age. 

“I don’t know,” Finn responds. “No one does. She just… deteriorated.”

"Do we -- do we not have a med droid?"

Finn shakes his head grimly. "We don't have anything."

Rey rubs her hand nervously over her chin. When she glances up, she finds that Finn and Poe have both turned to her, their eyes gleaming with an almost childlike wonder.

At last it is Finn who says, in reverent tones, what they both appear to be thinking. “What about the Force?”

Rey falters. “I… I don’t know.”

“Can you try?”

“Luke never taught me….” She trails off helplessly. Her mind wanders fleetingly to the Jedi texts in her quarters, but she shakes off the thought as quickly as it came. Even if she could _read_ them, they couldn’t teach her Force healing in a matter of hours. 

Still, moved almost to tears by the sight of the great Leia Organa on her deathbed, she takes a tentative step forward. “But I can try.”

Poe solemnly surrenders his bedside post. Rey seats herself gingerly on the bed, closing her eyes and reaching for Leia’s hand. Her blood pounds almost violently in her ears. _Peace_ , she commands herself. 

But when she takes Leia’s hand, her own body roars to life, and she feels the tendrils of his Force signature probing at the edges of her consciousness. Before she can stop it, before she can even think to, the bond rips open, white-hot and searing. 

A flood of images assaults her. All of Leia. Younger, smiling, and Han beside her. Showing off her son, so precociously strong with the Force, before an array of gawking, unfamiliar faces. Strolling away on the arm of a handsome senator, leaving his bedroom dark and shadow-striped behind her. Kissing his forehead, smoothing his hair. _My sweet boy. I love you._

The bond seems to tremble, then stretch taut. Rey feels a raw, violent gash of pain, sees the dark cockpit of his TIE silencer. Leia, older, the ranking commander of the Resistance, on the bridge of her ship. Her son’s thumb hovering over the trigger. Falling away.

“Finn, Poe,” she chokes out, her hand clutched instinctively to her stomach. “Leave. Please.”

Neither listens to her. “Hey, are you alright?” comes Poe’s voice through the haze. Finn’s follows, equally concerned: “Rey, Rey! I’m not leaving.”

She feels his presence more keenly now, hears the rustle of his robes.  
“I. Need. You. To. Leave,” she grits out.

At last they take the hint and depart slowly, fixing her with wondering stares. 

When, at last, she raises her eyes to look at him, he is a picture of majesty, arrayed in all the darkly splendid trappings of his high office. Black robes trimmed with gold, hair brushed back from his long, aristocratic face. But there is anguish in his eyes, anguish etched roughly into the very lines of his face, the downward arch of his brow and flat, hopeless line of his lips.

“I can’t see her,” he says simply, almost pleadingly.

Rey chews her lip. “Why are you here?”

“I can’t — you know I can’t control it.” He leans forward. “But my mother is dying. I feel it.”

“She’s not your mother.”

“Don’t say that.” There’s an edge to his tone.

“Leia’s son would have believed in the Republic,” she whispers, hating herself for the tears that bead in her eyes. “He would have believed in light, and truth, and justice, and hope.”

“Like you do,” he murmurs, as if in awe.

“Yes,” she spits back.

“If you believe in justice, let me see my mother. Before—” But he trails off, choking down a sob.

In her heart, through the bond, through the energy that courses light years between them, she feels the depth of his grief. And whether it’s the Force that compels her, or her own volition, or some tender harmony of the two, she extends a hand as if it is simply the only thing to do. 

When he takes it, the bond shudders, suffused with a deepening warmth. And then he is sitting on the edge of Leia’s cot, suddenly close enough that she feels his breath against her skin.  

In a slow, reverent sweep, he bends his head over his mother’s body, and Rey hears his quiet sobs. Around them the Force shifts, stretches, ebbs and flows almost violently. Even the walls seem to quake; outside the wind howls at a frenzied, feverish pitch, and the skies weep sheets of rain.

A storm of whispers descends upon her — voices familiar and foreign. All at once she hears Han’s boyish brogue, Luke’s thoughtful, measured tone, Leia’s sharp but motherly chiding — even the familiar roar of Chewbacca. There are others too, their words hardly discernible, until all are lost together in the loud, unrelenting hum of his memory. 

And then his voice, strong and broken at once, and echoing over and over: _I’m sorry_. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love writing and always have, but it's always been SUCH a struggle for me to finish things!! so here's hoping I can buck that trend with this little baby of mine (which I already love so much). anyway let me know what you think so far, and come say hi on tumblr @reylowastemanagement!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok, now we are getting into some newish characterization (in an admittedly VERY short chapter), but I'm not really sure how I feel about it... anyway, we'll see how things play out! thank you for the kind comments on the first two chapters, and expect chapter 4 (with more angsty!force bond) sometime later today :)

He finds himself before his grandfather’s helmet again.

“Was I weak?” he asks aloud.

But the mangled metallic face stares back at him with voided, indifferent eyes. 

Snoke would have reminded him, in his low and menacing way, that it was weakness that mangled the helmet at all, _sentiment_ that destroyed Darth Vader and allowed for the return of the Jedi. Kylo still feels  his old master’s warning, as fiercely and acutely as if it were branded into his flesh: _Had Lord Vader not succumbed to emotion at the crucial moment—had the father killed the son—the Empire would have prevailed._

The _Supremacy II_ crawls with new faces now, and they distract him. Snoke’s reign had only lasted days, and it had fallen, in turn, to his successor to determine how to rule and oversee the galactic worlds now under his mighty sway. He’d hated the idea, championed by Hux and his faction, of appointing governors and client-kings. “Let them keep their own kings and parliaments,” he’d said in council, months ago, when the burden of rulership had fallen squarely upon his shoulders, and he hadn’t been sure whether to relish it, or resent it, or fear it. 

“Loyalty, Supreme Leader!” Hux had crowed in reply, puffing out his chest like some preening animal. “You must demand a public display of loyalty from your subjects, and you must hold them accountable for their loyalty — always!”

Kylo had snapped the general’s arm behind his back, and held it there until he squirmed. “Must is not a word to be used to princes, General.”

Commander Krendar, Hux’s thinly-veiled protégé, had risen in place of his chastised mentor. “The General meant to suggest, sir, that your subjects — representatives from each planet — come aboard this ship in order to personally pay homage to their ruler. To swear an oath of allegiance — and, in the process, to match your face to your name.”

And, in time, he’s come to enjoy it, this strange incident of pomp and circumstance. He reads his subjects like textbooks, marveling at the heavy furs swathing the ice world natives, the splendid court dress of the old royal houses, the bizarre species that hail from the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Taken together they evoke dim, distant memories of Chandrila, of the sparkling galactic tapestry that was the Senate.

He closes his eyes. _Leia’s son would have believed in the Republic_.  

“Supreme Leader!” sounds his droid. Its tinny voice echoes distantly, as if lost in a haze, until, in more urgent tones, it repeats: “Supreme Leader! Lady Terenzia Sanza and Garban Klunk are here, in the name of the Congress of Sanpior.”

Kylo starts and looks up frantically, his eyes settling at last on two figures at the door. 

His gaze is drawn immediately to Lady Terenzia. She is young — no more than 18, he thinks — and dressed in a white gown that flutters gracefully around her ankles as she walks the bridge to the dais. As she and her companion — a corpulent, green-skinned creature — kneel before him and recite their oath, Kylo’s throat dries, and he struggles to look away. There is something in her manner, in the proud and stately way she carries herself, that reminds him of his mother. His eyes skate over the billowing snow-white of her dress, and before he can stop it, he feels the dangerous abyss of his memory gape open and drag him in. _When I met her — she was a vision in white. I’d never seen a more beautiful woman in my life. And — well. Let me tell you, kid, I’d seen plenty of women._

The girl is a vision in white. Even her aura is white, a perfect emanation of light and purity, and he shudders when she touches him, as if afraid that his darkness will corrupt her. She studies his face with a wide, curious gaze, and says, “May the Force be with you, Supreme Leader.” 

Garban Klunk leers at them.

Before they depart, he waddles over to Kylo and says, in a gruff whisper, “If the Supreme Leader should wish to become more… _intimately_ acquainted with Lady Terenzia, she would be honored to oblige you.”

Kylo’s jaw goes slack. “Excuse me?”

He grins lewdly. “Need I really say more?”

Disgust pools in his stomach. Kylo sets his jaw and spits out, “Get off my ship, Congressman.”

That night he forgoes dinner, and confines himself to his training rooms. He strikes down dummy after dummy after dummy, until his self-loathing bleeds out in his sweat. It’s better like this, when he sweats instead of weeps, when he is strong instead of weak, when he feels the raw power of his body ripple through his hands into the downward arc of his saber. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> major kudos to anyone who can spot the elizabeth I quote! :)


	4. Chapter 4

They bury Leia at the foot of the mountain, in a quiet grove overgrown with moss and brush. It is a simple ceremony, attended by only a smattering of officers, and silent save the gentle weeping of the mourners, and the trilling of the songbirds high in the trees. 

As two pilots lower her coffin into the earth, Rey turns to Poe and whispers, “This doesn’t feel right.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he echoes absentmindedly.

“Think of how many people knew her, loved her, believed in her — only for her to die… like this.” A sudden sadness overcomes her, more akin to regret than grief, and she wishes that she had taken the time to know Leia better. She looks almost pleadingly to Poe, who did. “Where was she from, originally?”

He sets his jaw. “Alderaan.” Anticipating her next question, he hurries to add: “But we can’t take her back there.”

“Not _now_ , of course—”

“Not ever. It’s gone. Blown up.” He meets her eyes grimly. “Death Star.”

Rey looks to the ground, and feels her ignorance of history so keenly that her face flushes pink. Haltingly she starts again, “What about her par—”

But the pink in her cheeks darkens to crimson when she realizes her mistake. 

“Yeah,” he half-spits, as his disgust curves his handsome features into a scowl.

“Who was her mother?”

Poe crosses his arms, shakes his head with a huff. “I don’t know,” he answers. “She didn’t talk about her much. All she said was… that she was beautiful. And sad.” He makes a short, breathy sound, almost like a laugh. “She must have been sad if she loved _him_.”

Something twinges in her stomach. “Love? She loved Darth Vader?” 

“I don’t know,” he says, narrowing his eyes slightly at the edge in her voice. “I don’t know the story.”

Rey looks to her feet again, and thinks of Darth Vader. There is an almost visceral dread attaching to his name, a dark legacy of murder and terror, of which she’d only heard snippets in her youth. But she’s seen his real likeness only once: in the hazy fields of Kylo Ren’s mind. There it was mounted on a pedestal, adored and worshipped and feared all at once.

But to her Darth Vader is the very soul of evil. Her heart shudders violently at the mere thought of him.

And yet there was a woman who loved him. Rey pities her.

 

Poe assumes command.

It is hardly a glorious ascension. Altogether the Resistance, even counting the recruits and stragglers gathered from the far, forgotten corners of the galaxy, numbers fifty-six fighters. Leia’s shrewd diplomacy in the months following Crait had won her cause precious little from its former allies.

Poe Dameron is no diplomat. He is raw where Leia was reserved, excitable where she was calm, impulsive where she was reflective. When he calls his first strategy meeting, Rey hardly recognizes him. His hair is grown out, and there is a desperate gleam to his eyes, a latent fury that is so unlike him, so utterly out of character, that it seems to change the very contours of his face. 

“Look,” he says, frustrated. “We gotta hold on to what Leia taught us. _Hope_. It’s — it’s like the sun. If you only believe in it when you can see it, you’ll never make it through the night.” But his voice falters, and it’s painfully obvious that he is struggling to believe the words himself.

“But we’re fighting a war here, and wars aren’t won on hope alone.” He looks down the table. “Rose and Finn, we’ll need to get you back to Canto Bight. Work out some kind of deal.”

Rose crosses her arms defiantly, shakes her head. “No. I’m not going back there. I’m not… _fraternizing_ with those people.”

“We need _weapons_ , Rose.” Poe heaves a sigh and leans his weight on his forearms, braced against the table. “If you’ve got a store of X-Wings hidden on some distant planet, by all means, let us know.”

“Hey,” says Finn sharply. “We also need money to buy those weapons. Money that _we don’t have_.”

“Correction — we don’t have _liquid_ assets,” Poe says. “But we have the kyber crystal of an apparently unrepairable lightsaber.”

“No!” Rey flies to her feet. “No! I’ve almost done it!”

“No,” echoes Finn, in her defense. “That’s Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber.”

“Luke Skywalker is dead, and his sister!” says Poe, with terrific bluntness. “The only Skywalker left is Kylo Ren. I don’t give a damn about their family lightsaber.”

Rey stands abruptly, fixing Poe with an implacable glare. “I’ve heard enough,” she spits, and stalks out of the room. She passes smoothly through her quarters, Force-snatching the saber and books from her workstation, and continues resolutely out of the base headquarters.

The ruby-red light of sunset turns the forest into a fire, the waving branches into flames. A high wind howls through the treetops as if to stoke them. Rey climbs furiously up to her mountainside retreat, where, panting, she impatiently unloads the contents of her bag and flips open the weapons manual. 

She feels him before she sees him, and wishes she could hide. It was easier when he was gone, when he was some distant enemy holed up in a distant ship. When he didn't move close to her, when she couldn't see the flecks of green and gold in his eyes. _The eyes of a murderer._

“You’re angry.” His voice rumbles into the air around her. “You’ve always had so much rage inside of you."

Exasperated, she sighs through gritted teeth. “You would know all about rage, wouldn’t you?”

He chews his lip. Around him she sees only a haze of black, and she almost smiles at how predictably _dark_ he and his surroundings always are. For a moment her mind wanders indulgently, and she wonders if he ever leaves his ship, sees the light of day.

But she clams up when she feels his gentle probe into her thoughts. “Are you going to call me a monster again?” he asks, his eyes raking meticulously over her face.

_No,_ she thinks, behind the walls she’s mounted against him. _Not now, not after... the other night_.

She almost says it aloud. But a cold, angry resolve rumbles in her chest, and instead she scoffs, “What happened to letting the past die?”

He winces, looks down.  “Ahh,” he says, a soft, fluttering sound. “You haven’t.”

“ _I_ never wanted to.”

“Really?” The word comes out so soft, so breathlessly soft, that she forgets, like she always does, who he is and what he’s done. “You want to carry Jakku with you? All that suffering? Starving, barely eating, day in and day out?” He pauses, tilts his head in his quiet, curious way. “Surely you want to be more than a scavenger.”

“Jakku made me strong. And besides, I _am_ more than a scavenger,” she says sharply. “You ought to know that, too.”

She means to remind him of her strength with the Force, her skill with a lightsaber. But his eyes soften, and the faintest hint of a smile hangs about his lips. _You’re nothing_ , he’d said. _But not to me._

Rey draws in a shuddering breath. “I’m not doing this again,” she says, and to her surprise, the words come out like a growl.

“Doing what?”

“Talking to you,” she says, as the menace in her tone ebbs. “Being tricked into caring about you.”

She balks at his shock, at the way his face seems to split open and bleed his pain into his eyes. But she pushes on, answers the unspoken question on his lips. “Yes, I cared about you! I cared about Ben Solo!” There are tears in her eyes, hot and indignant, and her chest aches like it did in Snoke’s throne room, all those months ago. “But your father was right — there’s too much Vader in you.”

Before she shuts him out, closes her eyes and grits her teeth and bends the bond to her will, she feels his pain in her bones. It tempts her, that dark voice in the shadows of her conscience; it wants her to relish his suffering. 

But she can’t. Not when her soul is tethered to his like this, and he feels nothing without her feeling it, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahh... our first oblique reference to anidala. love!
> 
> so I am a perfectionist and still not quite pleased with this chapter, but I want to move the story along and keep updating for you guys! I might pop back in and edit chapters as I read over them. anyway. chapter 5 is almost written and features the appearance of a special guest... stay tuned!


	5. Chapter 5

When she closes him out, he stands up.

His hands flex and twitch. 

He has grown accustomed to loneliness. It doesn’t drain him now as it once did. But somehow, infuriatingly, it’s different with her. Everything is different with her. 

In one swift, almost graceful movement, he snatches his lightsaber from his belt, ignites it, and slashes a red trail of sparks across the glinting Mustafarian throne. _Vader, indeed_.

“Supreme Leader!” comes Hux’s voice, sharp and urgent, from behind him. “The King in Armidia has arrived.”

Slowly, still shaking, he turns. His guards, whom he’d ordered out at the first whisper of her Force signature, file solemnly back to their posts. Then comes his droid, whirring with frustration. At last Hux ushers in their guest, a tall, elegant humanoid with blue skin and white, tightly braided hair.

The King in Armidia studies him with an exacting stare, as if he can’t believe what he’s just seen. Kylo feels a sudden rush of blood to his neck. Like a chastised child he sits, the fast-cooling rock hissing behind him. He curls his hands to fists.

The king kneels before his dais.

They usually look down when reciting the oath. Kylo has noticed this, and likes it. It’s better that they fear him, and that their fear manifest as respect. But the Armidian king looks up, sets his burning eyes squarely on Kylo’s face, as his voice echoes through the cavernous throne room: “I swear my undying allegiance to the First Order and to its Leader, the Lord Kylo Ren, whose supremacy over the galaxy and all who dwell within it I shall not now nor ever contest, and shall lay down life and limb to defend.”

As he mounts the dais to kiss the Supreme Leader’s ring, Kylo presses into his mind, finds it supple and giving beneath his probe. Even a cursory search yields an image of himself, eyes afire, defiling his own throne with a magnificent downward slash of his lightsaber. Contempt flares in the king’s mind, and disgust to match it. 

Kylo stands. The king’s eyes follow him.

“Tell me about the mines,” he says. If Armidia weren’t so rich with metal and mineral ores, he might have choked its king for his treachery.

“They’re doing well, sir,” responds the king, somewhat warily. “A reported forty-percent increase in production.”

“You’re selling to the right people, I presume?”

The king’s eyes narrow again, and Kylo fights the urge to kick him down the stairs. “Yes. Sir.”

Later, he checks. It’s a twenty-four percent increase.

“I want a Stormtrooper battalion sent to Armidia,” he tells Hux. “Peacekeeping in the capital.”

Hux blinks. For once his face is entirely serene, and Kylo feels even a pulse of admiration from the tight, messy web of his thoughts. “Very well, sir.”

But he finds he doesn’t think much more of Armidia. Instead he thinks of her.

He thinks of how, when she’s angry, her face flushes red, cheeks marked by twin flaming suns. He thinks of her face in the forest, on the island with Skywalker, before Snoke. _He thinks of her face in the elevator, when her eyes went impossibly soft, like a doe’s, and turned up to meet his. When she called him Ben. When she cared about him._ He thinks of her face — her wide eyes and parted lips, so beautiful and strong, caught in the raw throes of passion — awash in the crackling blue glow of his family lightsaber. He would hate her for taking it, if she didn’t wield it so well. If she wasn’t who she was.

He thinks of her at night, when the stars blink remotely outside his window, and he’s alone and cold in his bed. In his lowest moments, he thinks how warm she’d be beside him. How warm she’d be _around_ him. _How, breathless and quivering, she’d knot her fingers in his hair and gasp his name into his ear. “Ben.”_

He gulps. 

He’d do better to think of Armidia.

\--

Poe finds her in the mess hall later that night.

“I’m sorry,” he says, sitting beside her, and his tone is earnest and genuine. “I shouldn’t have… butted my head where it doesn’t belong.”

“It’s okay.” She slurps her soup without ceremony.

“No, really,” he presses. “I’ve never — I don’t get all this stuff with the Force, with Luke, with the light side and the dark. I know it’s not my place.” He ducks his head, leans in, and lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “But I feel like we’re fighting two different wars here.”

“We’re not,” she says. “Kylo Ren is the Supreme Leader now. Take him out, and the First Order and the dark side come down with him.” A distant memory stirs: Kylo Ren struck down in the snow, a flame-red gash down his cheek. She imagines slashing the other cheek open.

Rey sees her own bloodlust reflected in Poe’s eyes. “Of course,” he mutters lowly. “Of course.” 

Somewhere in her mind, shadowy and far away, there is another war. It asks her,  _If he dies, what happens to you_ _?_

After dinner she retreats to her room, declining Finn’s invitation to a round of cards with him and Rose.

“Oh, come on. I’ve got to practice for Canto Bight, you know,” he jokes, quirking his eyebrows.

“I’m sorry, Finn. I’m just — tired.”

“You’re always tired.” He means it lightly, but the words are barbed with truth. 

“Maybe tomorrow,” she says, and gives him a half-hearted hug. It almost feels like giving up.

Under the scalding heat of her shower, which she wishes would seep under her skin and clean her blood, her bones, her soul, she thinks again of the forest on Starkiller. She thinks of Kylo Ren’s blood spotting the snow, gurgling in the gash she’d opened on his darkly handsome face. She hadn’t known how deeply it had cut, that it snaked all down his neck to his collarbone. 

That night, when he’d appeared to her so abruptly, so clearly unprepared, so naked and vulnerable beneath her watchful gaze, the scar had looked grotesque, an ugly crack in the smooth, white marble of his chest. 

Watching herself in the mirror, she traces an identical path from her cheek to her breast, and feels under her finger an echo of distant heat. 

When she steps out of the fresher, she feels a cool rush of wind against her skin. Her nerves prickle, and she hiccups softly, clutching the towel tighter around her chest. But the air stills, and as she looks to the open window she knows it was only an errant draft.

She chews her thumbnail nervously. _It can’t go on like this_. She slips into a threadbare set of nightclothes — leftovers, luxurious even in their decay, from the abandoned stores of the Imperial-era rebel base — and sets herself to scouring the old Jedi texts. “There must be something,” she mutters to herself, pressing her forehead into the heel of her hand. “Anything.”

Suddenly, over her shoulder, sounds a familiar voice. “Thief!”

Rey lets out a yelp of fright, and, reaching instinctively for her staff, pivots so fiercely that her still-damp hair whips harshly against her face. She nearly drops the staff.

In the center of her bedroom stands — or floats, really — the hazy, bluish figure of Luke Skywalker. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I study european history at school, so you might have picked up on some echoes of english and french court life in this chapter and chapter 3 :)
> 
> y'all's comments are giving me life! thank you for your kind words. 
> 
> aaaand last but not least, shameless tumblr plug 2.0: @reylowastemanagement!! come visit my trashcan and say hello!


	6. Chapter 6

“Master Luke!” Rey suddenly feels her knees go weak, and she falls back against her makeshift desk for support. Her heart roars in her chest, and for a brief, fleeting moment of horror, she wonders if the base had been discovered and bombed, and if she is dead.

“I thought they were gone,” says Luke, moving toward her, and his eyes grow wide. “The sacred Jedi texts.”

“I took them before I left,” she says. “I’m sorry. I’ll take them back, if you like.”

“There’s nowhere to take them back to,” he answers. “They’re yours now. But there’s nothing written in them that you don’t already know.” His eyes shift across her desktop, and with a short laugh he says, “I see you’ve also managed to disrespect my lightsaber.”

“No!” she says. “I tried to save it — from Kylo Ren! He would have—”

Luke holds up a staying hand. “I know. The question now is: how the hell do you think you’re going to fix it?”

She glances frantically between him and the fractured crystal. “I’ll… use… the Force.”

He looks at her chidingly. “That’s not—”

“How the Force works, yes! I can tell!”

“No,” he continues. “It actually is how the Force works. I was going to say — that’s not going to be easy, not if you’re doing it alone.”

Understanding dawns. “Is that why you’re here?”

“In a way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he says, with a long, knowing sigh. “I can’t help you. _I_ didn’t break the crystal. But you did. You, and—”

“No.” Tears threaten beneath her eyelids. How does he do this still, she wonders, dredge up the roiling depths of her being, and turn them out in her tears? “Please. There has to be some other way.”

Luke tilts his head.“When I saw him in the hut on the island, I was terrified. I thought he’d pull you into the dark, just like he did with my other students.” If he were the real Luke, Luke in the flesh, a shadow of regret would have passed over his face, like it always did when he remembered Ben Solo. But this is a different incarnation of Luke Skywalker, one with death and life at once, and the serenity of his spirit manifests in his face. He picks up the broken halves of the crystal, brings them to her. “But this is something else. Something greater.”

“Greater?” She fights back the urge to scoff at his enigmas. “Greater than what?”

“Greater than the dark side, the light side.”

Another scoff dies in her throat, and she hangs her head, as if in shame. _He’s right,_ she hears, a remote echo, and not entirely her own.

The crystal halves weigh heavily in her hands, and she feels her soul stir to tune itself to their weeping song. It’s the same song she hears in her dreams, the song of the Force in bleeding shreds, a perverse, inverted echo of the peaceful hum that had sounded, ages ago, over the fire on Ahch-To.

When Luke speaks again, it’s after a long silence. “You need him.”

Rey shakes her head. “I have to wait. For — for the bond.”

“Do you?”

But when she looks up, a contradiction hot on her tongue, Luke is gone.

 _Do I_?

The galaxy stretches out before her, a velvet field of twinkling stars, and she breathes it in, pulls it into her chest. She feels the groaning of the planets, the great wide swath of dust and cosmic froth, shivering and shattering, down to the molecules that swim in the clouds that would bring forth stars. Death casts its pall, and life casts it off anew. Winters thaw and springs blossom, all to the cadence of her beating heart, and forests burn and seeds splinter and root in the earth. 

And then, suddenly, the waves flatten and still, and the fire simmers to embers, and he is there.

A dark curiosity fills her, and she is drawn, like she was drawn to the cave on Ahch-To, to his sleeping form, still and peaceful and striped with starlight and shadow. In a trance, almost, she lays her fingers over his crown of black hair. And it’s soft, devastatingly soft, beneath her fingers, like she’d imagined it would be. Did she imagine it? Or did she touch him some other time, some other place, and only now remembers?

His dreams blossom open. 

He dreams of a girl, young and robed all in white, her soul rotting out of her chest as she inclines her delicate head to kiss his ring. The rot stains her dress black, spreads over the room and swallows her whole, clouds like ink in the water below him as he swims, his breath coming quickly and harshly now, and he clambers out of the water, but the rot is spreading up the walls of the cave, closing around his hand, splayed wide over the shifting glassy rock, as her voice sounds in the distant nearness —

“Ben.”

\--

She is there. Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles: she is there.

 _Impossible_. His conscious echoes with a distant memory of cruelty.

“Rey,” he says. A pulse of warmth beats out from her chest, and he almost smiles.

For a long time neither of them speaks. Instead they sit there, with more than a galaxy and less than an arm’s length between them, each reveling in the exquisite impossibility of the other. At last the silence stretches thin, and Kylo watches raptly as her lips part and quiver in anticipation. 

“We never talked about your mother,” she says softly, and it’s not what he’d expected.

Now the bed seems to imply an almost embarrassing intimacy, so he stands and crosses to the window, watching a squadron of TIE fighters maneuver against a nondescript starfield. It occurs to him that he has no idea where in the galaxy they are. 

“Ben,” comes her voice, even softer, from behind him. _Soft, like in the elevator._ “We never talked about any of it.”

“Because,” he says, fighting to keep his voice level, “you ran away.”

If he didn’t still feel her, sense her presence so viscerally, he would’ve worried at the long silence that follows. But her voice is firm and immediate when she finally says, “I didn’t have a choice.”

It sets his blood to pounding, and he whirls around to face her. “I gave you a choice! And _you chose_ to let the war go on.” He steps closer, and his whole body is trembling now, from anger or want or both. “Now all of your friends will die. You know that. You have to.”

She turns her face away. 

“Rey,” he whispers desperately, savoring the sweetness of her name on his lips, and touches her cheek to tilt her face up toward his. “It isn’t too late.”

For a moment — brief, fleeting, almost slippery, like he’ll lose it to the wash of time and space if he doesn’t hold on — he thinks she’ll say yes. She can’t be happy there, he thinks, among the scrappy pilots and galactic dregs of the Resistance. There is a depth to her, a sacred union between her soul and every world that teems beyond it, that no one can understand. No one except him. Her eyes flicker between his, her throat bobs as she swallows, her lips part and hang open, suspended on a dangerous verge — _he wants to kiss her_ —  

“Ben, I need your help,” she says, stepping back. As he blinks, drags himself out this sudden squall  of feeling, she reaches into a pouch at her belt and pulls out two halves of a kyber crystal. “It’s Luke’s lightsaber,” she continues. “The crystal… it’s broken. You’re the only one who can help me fix it.”

At last he feels to his bones the cool press of reality. She needs him again, and not in the way he’d been so stupid, so hideously, pathetically stupid, as to believe.

“I can’t,” he says bluntly.

“Yes, you can. _We_ can do it — together.” Her eyes are soft again, dusky and pleading, and he almost assents.

But he turns his back, closes his eyes and presses his lips together where she can’t see. “I need to sleep,” he barks out gruffly. 

“Ben.”

“I can’t help you.”

The bond dissolves. Suddenly he is cold again, and empty and alone, and with an almost manic desperation he clutches for something, anything, even the thinnest thread, to call her back. But the nothingness left in her wake is terrifyingly vast, as if she’d sucked all the life of the galaxy into herself, and disappeared between the folds of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AAANNNNNGGGGSSSSTTTTTTTT, it's strong with this one. they're such disasters at communication, both of them. 
> 
> force ghost luke is coming for kylo next chapter. prepare for -- you guessed it! -- more angst, and the moodiest we've seen kylo ren yet!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lots of throwbacks in this chapter because why not. :) sorry for the delay in updating -- I'm in the middle of exams at school, but should be back to regularly scheduled updates in a week or so!

The helmet stares back at him. 

Charred and maimed and blackened, it is nothing more and nothing less than death objectified. Once he shuddered to think of the great Sith lord reduced to the silence and impotence of death. Now he almost envies him. _I want to be free of this pain_.

Then, abruptly, a voice from over his shoulder: “ _Where_ did you get that?”

Kylo’s heart sinks. He’d known this would happen, but he hates it all the same; his lip curls in disgust. “You.”

“Well, it must have come from Endor,” Luke muses. “But _how_ did you get it?”

“My knights retrieved it.”

“Ah.” Luke smiles. “A quest to fetch your sacred relic.” He moves forward gracefully, almost floating, and lifts the helmet to study it. 

“Don’t patronize me.”

Luke’s eyes are fixed upon the helmet, cradled softly between his hands. “Do you know what happened?”

“Yes, of course I know,” he spits.

Luke shakes his head. “Wrong again.”

Kylo feels a familiar ache in his temple, and his stomach knots with panic. _No,_ he hears, his own voice, echoing distantly as his vision blurs and his ears ring. But soon the blur dissolves, and a new scene emerges, brightly painted by the mists of memory. Luke, younger and fair-haired, dragging his father’s body through a crowd of panicked stormtroopers and Imperial officers. Collapsing to the ground, removing his helmet and revealing the face of the man who once, and now again, was Anakin Skywalker. Kylo’s throat suddenly feels hot with rising bile.

_Go, my son. Leave me._

_No. You’re coming with me. I’ll not leave you here. I’ve got to save you!_

_You already have. Luke, you were right. You were right about me. Tell your sister… you were right._

The scene blurs again, and suddenly the crackle of flames is sounding gently in his ears, and Luke appears again, still young and starkly blond, before a blazing funeral pyre. His brow is furrowed, eyes narrowed, mouth just open, as if in awe. 

_I burn his armor and with it the name of Darth Vader. May the name of Anakin Skywalker be a light that guides the Jedi for generations to come… Rest well, father. The Force is with you._

Kylo feels his chest warm, as if he had been there himself, and felt the Force open its arms like a mother to gather up the soul of Anakin Skywalker. 

In the vision, Luke’s face relaxes; he feels it too, the quiet calm of the Force at peace.

At length the face of young Luke Skywalker dissolves into the old, turns from vivid flesh to bluish haze. Now, too, he is serene, watching his nephew expectantly. 

Kylo’s serenity is shorter-lived, and shatters at the first prick of relived trauma. In a shaking voice he repeats the truth that always haunted him, the knife that twisted deeper into his gut with Snoke’s every telling: “You… you thought _he_ was worth saving.”

“Ben,” Luke begins, and Kylo, suddenly so _tired_ of hatred, does not protest. “My father saved me, and I loved him, and he died in my arms. I never thought _anything_ would be harder than that. But I was wrong. When your mother told me she was pregnant, I was afraid. I knew her child would be born with a power that could bring the galaxy to its knees if shaped by the wrong hands.”

Kylo turns his face away.

“I was _afraid_ , Ben. I let my fear get the best of me.” He hangs his head. “I should have listened to your mother. She was always so full of hope.”

 _Hope._ Kylo’s heart thrums. 

_“Oh, he liked that one!” Luke laughs, bouncing Ben on his knee, and lowers his head until it hovers across from the round, pinkish face of his sister’s son. “I’ll tell you a secret, Ben — it’s my favorite, too. Play it again, Artoo!”_

_Artoo beeps accommodatingly._

_Ben coos when he sees his mother’s image. “Mama!”_

_“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” she says. Her voice is strong and soft — pleading, but not despairing_. _“You’re my only hope_.”

Kylo rises suddenly to his feet, heart pounding a vicious rhythm against his breastbone. Whatever this is, he wants so badly to fight it, to crush it under his toe and _kill_ it. It terrifies him. He thinks it’ll tear him apart, once and for all, and fling the broken pieces of him to the farthest corners of the galaxy, where no one could ever be bothered to find them.

“She’s gone now,” Luke continues. “But her hope didn’t go with her. It still lives, you know — in someone else.”

Kylo’s chin twitches toward his shoulder, and he almost turns — whether to confront his uncle, or simply to listen to him, he can’t be sure. But he is stilled by the thousand visions of _someone else_ that flutter through his mind’s eye.

Luke’s voice hardens. “She fought me, you know. On the island. She roared out of the hut and nearly killed me. For your sake.”

Rearing, Kylo can barely breathe as the image, dark and streaked with driving rain, hurtles into his mind. In it she towers high over Skywalker, all fiery strength and fury, her fists curled at her sides, her chest heaving. _Is it true? Did you try to murder him?_

He feels his face go slack, his mouth falling open in disbelief, and the thousand visions slow to a crawl, until he sees the firelight reflected in her eyes, and beneath it an almost otherworldly glow… of _hope._

When he looks up, Luke is gone.

Kylo takes the helmet from its quasi-altar. In the corridor, troopers scurry like frightened animals to avoid him. Junior officers click their heels and salute his approach, the muscles in their faces twitching with fear; senior officers, more jaded, only regard him with wary apprehension. He hardly notices them.

When the moment comes, the airlock door springing open to send the helmet careening finally and utterly out of his grasp, he flinches, and the glass of the inner door fogs with his gasping breath. 

As he watches the mangled hunk of metal tumble weightlessly into the star-spangled black, the muscles in his fingers twitch to curl into the fists they know so well, and his heart resounds instinctually with the first rumbles of hatred — for Luke, for Anakin, for himself. But there is something else inside of him, something fuller, richer, that sings instead of weeps, that claws to get out instead of burrowing itself in. “I feel it again,” he whispers, to no one in particular, as the helmet fades into the nothingness of space. “The pull to the Light.”

 --

Rey is happy for a cold shower.

The climate on Arbra is mild, almost cool. But there is a memory of scalding sunlight burned into her skin, and her blood still runs hot in her veins. The cold is a welcome reprieve.  

As the water pelts her shoulders, snakes down her back, she closes her eyes and leans her forehead against the cold tile. Her arms ache, her legs even worse; the muscle tightens and spasms rudely after hours of training. She’d trekked into the mountains at dawn and only returned long after nightfall, when Finn had accosted her furiously. “You can’t keep running off like that! You’re scaring me!” 

“I always come back, Finn.” 

His face had softened, and he’d pulled her tight against his chest, until the warmth of his body had calmed the trembling in her fingers. “You’re right,” he’d said softly. “I trust you.”

Now she almost hates herself for saying it. What if one day she doesn’t come back — _she almost didn’t, she almost said yes_ — and he’s left waiting unto the ages, helpless and alone? What if she proves no better than her parents?

Rey turns her face into the shower again, closes her eyes against the sudden rush of water, and almost laughs aloud at her own self-indulgence. Finn would never be alone. He has Rose now, and Poe: love and friendship enough to sustain him, even without her. 

She’s noticed how tender he is with Rose, how quietly loving. A kiss pressed gently to her forehead, a pair of fingers raised to brush her hair from her eyes. He loves her, and not with a love that would light whole galaxies afire. Finn’s love is a simple, humble thing.

In a way, Rey knows he loves her, too. But there’s a distance between them that gapes wider every day. The strength and power within her is far beyond his understanding, and the more he treats her like a god among men, the more she feels like an oddity, a wild animal kept as a pet. It’s a new loneliness, this one, and somehow it cuts still deeper into her soul. 

_You’re so lonely… so afraid to leave. At night, desperate to sleep._

She shivers.

The echo sounds coolly and persistently in her mind, curling from the edges of her memory into the beating heart of her consciousness, where it lodges firmly, like it always does. Like _he_ always does. It comes back to her, all of it, in a sudden flood: the cool metal sting of her restraints, the sweat beading over her lip from the exertion of resisting him, his face close to hers, so close that she felt — almost feels now, even beneath the cold rush of water — his breath play across her neck. 

When she’d forced it open, his mind had been a dark prison of shadows, haunted urgently by the legacy of Vader, Vader, _always_ Vader. Another man’s voice — Snoke’s, she knows now — rumbling darkly with scorn, had resounded throughout: _son of darkness, heir of Lord Vader. Finish what your grandfather started. Kill where he could not. Rise where he fell._

His mind is different now. She feels it.

Stars, she feels _him_ —

“Maker!” she shrieks, and snaps a towel around her dripping body.

His face flushes brilliantly. “I’m sorry.” But he doesn’t turn around.

She’s opened her mouth and almost commanded him to when she realizes, her own cheeks flushing now, that to stand before him so exposed, so vulnerable, with his eyes trailing down her body, triggers a curious rush of heat between her legs.

At length he turns his back. “I want to help you,” he says over his shoulder. “With the saber.”

"What?" she says, scrambling out of the fresher.

“You said you needed my help.”

“I — I do.”

He turns to face her. “We should get started.”

“I should get dressed.”

His lips part.

Her cheeks flush a still deeper crimson. He wouldn’t _dare_ —

“Turn around,” she snaps.

When she’s dressed herself — and slipped on an old field jacket to cover her threadbare pajamas — she gathers the halves of the crystal and brings them to him. His lip curls at the sight of the symbol of the old Rebel Alliance prominently emblazoned on her sleeve. 

“I’m sorry, Supreme Leader,” she says quietly, her voice lilting with mocking. “Have I offended you?”

“Let’s get to work,” he snaps.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks. “You’re only helping _me_.”

He picks up one half of the crystal, and it shivers in his hand. “This lightsaber is mine.”

“No, it’s not,” she cuts back, snatching the crystal away. 

His eyes flash darkly to hers and hold them. “We’ll meet again. Soon. We’ll decide this then.”

The thought sends a prickling chill under her skin. 

He shifts, as if to diffuse the tension suddenly stretched taut between them. “I know more about this than you do,” he says, with all the haughtiness she’s come to expect of him. “You have to — _commune_ with it. Here.” He covers her hand with his — she’d almost forgotten how big they are, his hands — and curls it around the crystal’s jagged, glinting edges. “Close your eyes. Feel it. _Hear_ it.”

“I’ve heard it already,” she whispers, but closes her eyes as he commands. “I hear it every night in my dreams. Don’t you?”

His voice is low and raw and stripped of its arrogance when he answers, “Yes.”

Rey’s eyes fly open to find his fixed low on her face. Through the bond she feels a flash of panic, even embarrassment, and her brow furrows.

“Close your eyes,” he repeats gruffly, and she obeys. She hears the soft rush of leather against his skin as he removes his gloves. “Listen more closely.” His hand settles over hers.

But suddenly the air around them whines, and sounds with a sharp note of splintering. Rey opens her eyes to find the crystal in his hand cracked open and leaking a glowing, reddish stream. 

“What have you done?” she shrieks, her hand flying to the crystal and staying the bleeding — it’s the only way she can describe it, _bleeding_ , and it terrifies her — with her palm. 

His mouth hangs open in horror. “I—”

“Fix it!” The blood trickles out from under her hand. 

He covers her hand with his, closes his eyes, sets his jaw. The Force groans around them. A thousand stars shatter over their heads, and Rey feels deep in her soul a sudden but familiar tug, and all at once she’s falling, falling—

Gone is the gentle cold. Now there is only flame, and lava, bubbling and burning and glowing a hideous, hellish red. Her throat tightens and dries, and a voice — familiar, devastatingly so — roars in her ears. 

_You were my brother, Anakin! I loved you!_

And she’s never seen an uglier sight than this, this body crumbling half to ash before her eyes, flame peeling skin away from flesh. _No, no, no more death_ , she thinks, and turns to run away, and she does, but only just, as the rock beneath her feet turns molten.

Now a corridor, lit with a light so bright it’s almost blue, and she’s seen this before — and there is breathing in her ears, strangely inhuman, almost mechanical, and she knows in her heart whose it is, and why it sounds its inhuman cadence, and her heart turns to stone in her chest, weighs her down, drags her down and down and down and — 

His body is heavy in her arms, his blood warm on her fingers. 

_Ben! Ben, come back. Come back! Please! Ben, please. I love you._

A flash of white as the glittering shards of shattered stars fit together again, and the Force hums, and then - to her relief? - he is there before her again, eyes wide and chest heaving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes, yes. hehe. our sweet children are going to have to deal with the many legacies of anakin skywalker or what is this sequel trilogy about?!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my dear and faithful readership, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart for all your kudos, comments, and tumblr messages (and good luck wishes on exams -- I'm almost done)! all your words of encouragement give me life <3 and, more importantly, they make me want to keep writing and writing and writing forever! 
> 
> so here is the fruit of that impulse. hope you all enjoy!

He’s made a study of her eyes.

They’re green, and murky, but still telling. He knows how in fury they darken and spark like storm-clouds with lightning; how in questioning, they flit and flitter beneath knitted brows. In mocking they’re brash and flashing; in fear, round and white and haunted by a shadow of something unexpected, almost like curiosity; and in hope — a new discovery — they’re at their softest, warm and searching for purchase in the world just beyond. But Kylo thinks he knows them best in loneliness. They’re only mirrors, then, not windows.

He studies them now, so intently he sees the brown flecks swimming near her irises. A long, tense silence has stretched between them, and he finds he’s almost scared of what she’ll say. _If she saw what he saw_ —

But there is no turmoil in her eyes, none so wretched and violent as to match whatever it is that churns against his ribs. Instead the murky green of her irises is dull with fatigue.  

When she speaks, her voice is heavy. “Why me?” A beat of silence, then, with more feeling: “You’re his grandson. Of course you have it. The Force. The saber.” _Anakin — she saw Anakin_? “But I’m—” Her throat bobs, and her darkening eyes find his. “You said it yourself. I come from nothing. I have no place in this story.”

“What did you think you’d see?” he presses indignantly. The dream comes back to him: the silvery blue rock, the cool echo of her voice, her body limp in his arms. “In the cave, when you asked to see your parents. Skywalker?” His skin grows hot, and he almost bites the next words down before they’re out. “Han Solo?”

“Someone,” she returns simply.

He narrows his eyes, frustrated. “And you’re not someone?”

“Not according to you.”

“Stop that,” he half-growls. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Then why—”

“You knew it already. You were just afraid to say it.”

Suddenly the resolve in her face weakens, and he feels his breath catch, worried she’ll cry again. With a sigh he softens his voice, leans forward, almost touches her face. “Don’t you know how _lucky_ you are to be no one?”

_Luke’s hand is warm on his shoulder. “This is Ben, our newest padawan. Yes, he is my sister’s son, but he will work just as hard as all of you, to earn the same honor, and no more. Isn’t that right, Ben?”_

_“Yes, Uncle Luke. I mean — Master Skywalker.”_

_Only two nights later, Cesador Larstok, the young, black-haired prodigy almost as strong as Ben in the Force, finds him at supper and asks, barely louder than a whisper: “Have you ever seen Darth Vader’s Force ghost?”_

_“No!” Ben responds, turning his attention pointedly to his meal. “The only person who has ever seen his Force ghost is Master Skywalker — and even then, it was Anakin Skywalker he saw, not Darth Vader. Only light siders can manifest as Force ghosts.”_

_But that night he dreams of Darth Vader. He isn’t sure how, or why, but he’s sure it’s Vader’s palace whose black halls he walks. A voice is beckoning him, so close and so far at once — “son of darkness,” it calls him, “blood of the Sith.” It frightens him. He wants to stop, turn around, wake up, but his feet are moving of their own accord. His chest tightens and his skin shudders and no, no, he’s Leia’s son, his is the heart of a Jedi, and it will not be corrupted—!_

He closes his eyes. 

“Fine,” she says, softly, and he wonders if she feels his pain. She must, mustn't she? If he feels hers? “I’m no one. My parents were filthy junk-traders. But still _—_   _why me_?”

Kylo remembers the awakening. He’d felt it in his bones, down to the very fibers of his being. For days he hadn’t slept for the incessant hum of the Force, the rich fund of life that had suddenly swelled inside of him and poured its light into the far, shadowy corners of his soul. It had frightened him — and worse, frightened Snoke.

_I train you for years, only to see your equal rise in a matter of weeks? Pathetic, useless child._

“I don’t know,” he confesses, and leaves the rest —  _but I want to know, I think I might already —_ unsaid.

Her eyes, wet with tears, fall to the crystal in her hands. It’s healed perfectly, the crack down its center disappeared beneath a soft blue glow, and trilling that same gentle hum. The one he’d heard in his dreams at the awakening of the Force, over the fire on the island, when he’d called his grandfather’s lightsaber through his master’s stomach and into her hand. 

“This thing between us,” she whispers, like she’s afraid of it. “It’s stronger now.”

It’s true. The mattress — a whole galaxy away, thin and worn on some abandoned Rebel base — gives gently beneath him now, and his skin cools at a damp breeze that flits in from the window. And she, crystal-clear and exquisite before him, is alive and infinite in the Force. 

“I feel you,” she says, and her voice drops lower still. “Like I’m inside of you. Like — it’s my blood in your veins, and your heart in my chest.”

But her brow furrows worriedly when she says it, and her eyes flicker with a shadow of fear — fear and something else. He’d called it curiosity once, and now he thinks it must be, because there is a question hovering on her lips. _Why have I_ always _felt you_?

Kylo’s chest aches, and he wonders how much longer he’ll be able to bear this — bear her, with her eyes the green of forests and heart the strength of kyber. “I know,” he answers, dropping his voice to match hers. “I feel it, too.”

Her lips purse. “I don’t understand it.”

“Neither do I.” The words taste sweetly of surrender. 

When her face turns up to him, it’s open and pleading, and he can’t tell what she wants from him. Now her eyes tell a thousand stories, beg a thousand questions. 

At length he does all that he can bear to do. He reaches out, wraps his arms around her quivering shoulders, and folds her into his chest. 

\--

He’s so _warm_.

In her mind he was always cold — his was the cold of the snowbound forest on Starkiller, of the black heart of evil. But now she feels the warmth of his chest, even through his padded vest, even through the stars and clouds and dust and emptiness of space that stretches between them. 

If she wanted to, of course, she could push him away, beat his chest with her fists, spit insults into the face she’d marked long ago as hers alone. A storm of questions gathers at the back of her mind — _What are you doing? Who are you? Did he not kill his father, before your own eyes? Did you not see him_ die _, feel his blood on your hands_?But she drowns it out with the song of her soul, so long starved of meaning and belonging, and now, if even for a moment, at peace.

She’d dreamt of this on Jakku, when the desert winds howled outside her AT-AT. She’d dreamt of a touch as tender as his, of someone who would hold her and comfort her and make her feel whole. 

Rey tucks her head under his chin and lets her dreams blossom into the heart of the bond. 

 

When at last the bond quivers weakly and fades, neither of them speaks a word. Words are mundane now, almost vulgar. Instead the Force simply releases them, and she allows it, knowing he'll be back. As his chest dissolves under her cheek, Rey collapses against the mattress and sighs into the sheets still marked with his warmth.

Once, long ago, ages ago, she’d struggled and strained against it — against him, against their bond, against the way that fate had seemed mark him out as so much more than her enemy. Luke’s words come back to her: _This is something else. Something greater._ Only now, in the full flower of this strange energy between them, does she begin to understand what he meant.  

That night, she dreams of the cave. It's dark like she remembers, and shimmering with blues and grey. The mirror beckons her again, and she lays her fingers against its silvered glass. "Why me?" she whispers.

A figure moves in the shadows: the prophet of her destiny. She strains closer, closer, and closer still, as if she would press her nose against the cool rock. But her feet are rooted in place, and the figure's advance is slow.

"Let me see him," she whispers, begging.

He's closer now, and she can make out the outline of his robes. They're the robes of the Jedi, but darker — black and grey instead of sand and brown. 

"Luke?"

No.

The glass melts and she falls into his arms. 

 

The next morning, Rey takes the lightsaber into the mountains again, almost laughing with joy at the familiar whine of its blade. There’s a new energy to it, raw and powerful, and it ripples in her hands as the golden mid-morning sunlight spills into the cave and warms her skin. 

At midday she descends to the base, where Finn and Rose are stunned to see her in the mess hall.

“Well, well, well!” Finn nearly bellows when she enters. “Look who it is!” He pauses, eyes narrowing. “And — stars above — she’s smiling too? I can’t believe it. Rose, I am officially flabbergasted.”

Rey grins, Force-grabbing a tray of food and joining them at the table. 

Finn scoffs dramatically. “Stop showing off.”

“You love it,” she volleys back, and catches the flash of surprise that passes across his face. He hasn’t seen her like this in a long time. She hasn’t felt like this in a long time.

“What do you do up there, anyway?” Rose asks. “In the mountains?”

“Train.” Rey reaches into her bag and pulls out the lightsaber. “With this.” 

Finn’s eyes shoot wide. “You fixed it?”

In answer, she ignites it. The whole mess hall falls silent at the signature _womp_ of a lightsaber, and turns to face her. 

"But how -- how did you fix it?" says Finn, his voice thick with wonder.

For a moment Rey hesitates, then decides on the answer she imagines he's looking for. "I used the Force."

He has to laugh.

Rose’s face, meanwhile, is still: a perfect picture of awe. “Oh — wow," she murmurs. "Wow. I’ve never… seen a — a lightsaber before.” 

“Do you want to hold it?”

The sight of Rose Tico with a lightsaber warms Rey’s heart beyond imagining. Her eyes are bright, half with the saber’s glow, half with childlike wonder. “Wow,” she breathes to herself. “It’s beautiful. Almost… elegant.”

As Rey opens her mouth to respond, a distant voice sounds in the far reaches of her mind: _An elegant weapon for a more civilized age._

It’s not his. No, this voice lilts the way hers does, and sounds along a familiar cadence, one she’s heard before. _These are your first steps. You will be tempted… the Force… Anakin!_ Curious, she digs into those far reaches, seeking it out again. _Who are you?_

“Okay, okay,” comes Finn’s voice, breaking her reverie and dragging her rudely — though for the best, she reflects — out of the mysteries of the Force and back into his world. “That’s enough. Give it back.”

Rey blinks, and finds an enraptured Rose suddenly unwilling to part with the saber.

“Careful,” she says, reaching across the table to pry the hilt from Rose’s hands. “It’s not an easy weapon to wield.” Her eyes dart to Finn’s, and she says proudly, with a smile, “Although Finn did pretty well for himself.”

He beams. 

“Where’s Poe?” Rey asks when the saber is returned to her bag, and the hall fills again with the busy hum of conversation.

“Comms room.”

But suddenly the mess hall doors burst open and there — not, in fact, in the comms room — is Poe Dameron. He’s breathing heavily, his face burning red. When his eyes fall at last on Rey, there’s light in them again, not just a spark but a _blaze_ of hope. “Rey! You’re here — thank the stars. You’ve gotta come with me.”

"Poe, what's going on?"

He runs over to their table and takes her hand urgently. “We’ve got a visitor. Don’t worry — a friend.”

He leads her to the comms room, where a BB-unit, painted blue and white, beeps excitedly at the sight of her.

“Who’s this?” she says.

The droid responds that it’s been sent as an emissary.

“From who?”

It beeps out its answer — “I’ll show you” — and beams up a hologram. In it stands a creature Rey’s never seen: he is tall, impossibly elegant, blue of skin and white of hair, robed in glinting silver. “General Dameron,” he says, in velvet tones. “This is the King in Armidia. Five months ago I received a distress signal from the late General Organa and, in my cowardice, ignored it. Every day that decision weights more heavily on my heart. I wish I had been there to fight along side her, alongside you. I wish I had been there to see the return of Luke Skywalker, and of his last apprentice.”

Rey feels a gentle twinge in her chest.

“One week ago I was summoned to the Supreme Leader’s flagship to swear an oath of fealty. I have never—” Here the king balls his fists, evidently at pains to retain his composure. “I entered the throne room to find the man who purports to rule our galaxy in the midst of a child’s tantrum. For no reason his officers could explain, and in what seemed a fit of rage, he defiled his throne with his own lightsaber. Nor was this incident out of keeping with his character. The whole ship stinks with his officers’ contempt for him.” The king straightens his back in the hologram, tilts his chin proudly. “I will not submit my people to such a leader. General Dameron — I believe in you and in the Resistance. I believe that we can and must restore the Republic.” He pauses, as if unsure, then: “I believe in the Jedi. The last of them is with you. And so am I.”

“He wants us to come to Armidia,” Poe says excitedly, turning to face her. “Rey — this is it. This is how we win the war. Do you know how _rich_ Armidia is, how cutting it off from the First Order could—”

“Us?”

“Yeah,” he says, slapping her arm lightly with the back of his hand. “You and me.”

“But why me?” 

“You heard him.” Poe’s eyes are gleaming now, and he lowers his voice to a reverent whisper. “You’re the last Jedi. You’re our last hope.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you again for all your comments, kudos, and love!! it all inspires me so much, and means the world to me <3 I'm sorry it's taken me so long to update! I really struggled with writing this chapter, and I'm still not sure if the characterization is right or even makes sense... so let me know. hehe. oh and I'm terribly sorry that this chapter is so plot-heavy (oops!), but we will be back to the regularly scheduled reylo programming soon. :)
> 
> one quick note -- in an earlier chapter we saw rey reflecting on a very dark image of darth vader, and a commenter was so good as to remind me that in tlj, she confronts luke and reminds him that "it was a jedi who saved him." tbh this makes zero sense to me. I (only a movie watcher, to be fair) have no idea how rey would know about the redemption of anakin skywalker, unless she somehow saw it in kylo's mind....? anyway, point is I am departing slightly from movie canon in giving you naive!rey when it comes to the details of the anakin/vader story. I'm sure there are plenty of plausible explanations for her knowing the truth, but in this context, for the story I'm trying to tell, I think it's better that she doesn't! anyway hope that's ok. enjoy! :)

Rey shakes her head. “No.”

“Yes,” Poe counters, setting his jaw. “Don’t you — this is a pretty big deal, Rey!”

“What do you want me to do? Do some tricks?” Suddenly she’s exasperated. “I don’t know — lift rocks?”

“It’s not about what _I_ want you to do,” Poe says. “I’m not the one with the richest mining planet in the galaxy for a backyard.” He sets his hands on her shoulders, squares his face with hers. “C’mon. Quick trip. A little galactic sightseeing, yeah?”

Rey ducks her head.

Five months. Five months she’d hated him, and been dazzlingly certain in her hate. It was easier then, when the bond was closed and he existed only in some faraway ship — or else in her memory, where the image of his saber through his father’s stomach still burned brighter and more fiercely than that of his tear-glossed eyes over the fire on Ahch-To; or of his face, afraid and grieving and hopeful all at once, in the throne room. 

After Crait she’d found herself consumed by anger. Anger at him for his stubborn loyalty. Anger at herself for her foolishness in thinking she could turn him. The longer she went without seeing him, without even hearing of him, the longer her anger simmered, festered, and eventually turned to hate. 

But Rey had tricked herself before. Her conscious and memory were a fickle, dishonest pair. Together they’d convinced her for years, after all, that her parents would come back. _I’m not doing this again_ , she’d told him once, in a storm of anger. _Talking to you_. _Being tricked into caring about you._ But when he’d held her against his chest, and she’d felt the gentle, familiar rhythm of his heartbeat across the stars, she had known that she’d only ever been tricked into hating him, not caring about him.

But she wonders now if she’s being tricked again, because a flood of shame burns through her veins at the thought of his holding her, touching her, smoothing his broad hands across the quivering muscle of her back. An impossible intimacy, and she’d allowed it — craved it, even, curling into his chest until she’d felt their souls mingle in the ether. Is she foolish to have given up so much of herself to her sworn enemy? Weak to crave it still?

She must be weak, because she says to Poe, “Let me think about it.”

It frustrates him, but he nods reluctantly and says in a crisp tone, “Okay. You deserve that.”

Rey bristles. She doesn’t need to be told what she deserves.

Only Finn senses the depth of her anxiety. He finds her just outside the main barracks, and he’s hardly noticed her before his face softens and he crosses the yard to where she stands. “C’mon,” he says, taking her hand. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Stop taking my hand,” she teases, and Finn smiles.

They wander into the forest. The sun is obscured by the clouds now, and a low whipping wind heralds an incoming storm. Finn — good, caring, gentle Finn — knows her well enough not to speak. Not yet. The silence hangs loosely and naturally between them, and bears well the weight of time. Rey closes her eyes. 

“Rey, you can talk to me,” he says finally, when they’re deep in the brush, and the air around them is quiet save for the soft whistle of wind in the trees.

If only she could. 

He sighs. “Listen, I don’t know what happened with Luke — if he said something, did something, but I want you to know that I’m here for you, okay?” 

It’s all she can do not to cry. Instead she looks up, knitting her brows tightly, and asks, “Why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Defect.”

“I’ve told you—”

“Tell me again.”

Finn studies her warily, then crosses to a fallen log to sit. “I was scared,” he confesses after a long silence. “The first battle… I was terrified. But I wasn’t going to channel my fear into killing. Especially not for them.”

It almost seems absurd, the depth of his goodness, and Rey wishes fiercely that it weren’t such a rare and impossible thing. “For who?” she says weakly, anticipating his answer. 

His eyes narrow, and suspicion rolls off him in waves. “The First Order. Phasma.”  
Rey gulps, then presses him: “Kylo Ren.”

“Him too,” Finn answers slowly. “Rey, what’s—”

“Did you know him?”

“ _Know_ him? No, of course not—”

“But you must have had some… some interaction with him.”

Finn throws up his arms in exasperation and half-sighs, half-snaps, “Would you let me finish?”

As if chastised, Rey moves away from him, feels the taut muscle in her shoulders relax.

“I didn’t know him,” Finn continues. “He didn’t command troopers. He was always… doing something else.”

“What, though?”

“I don’t know, Rey, why don’t you ask him yourself?”

She gasps and almost recoils, panicked, before realizing at length that he only meant it sarcastically, that he couldn’t _possibly_ know. “I hardly know him is all,” she says, lying, gauging his reaction. “But I… need to.” 

Finn shifts his jaw. Rey senses his discomfort. “There are other dark-siders who follow him. He’s their… their _master_ or something.” He drops his eyes. “Six of them. They’re called the Knights of Ren.”

“The Knights of Ren?” Rey shudders, and wonders why she didn’t feel them on the _Supremacy_ , feel the dark roiling of the Force beyond the throne room. She imagines the light of seven red sabers drowning out the faint blue glow of hers, and her skin prickles with fear.

“Yeah.” Finn tugs a twig out of the packed earth and traces an arc around his feet. “No one ever knew much about them. Who they were, where they came from. But they only answered to Kylo Ren.”

“And they all had the Force?”

He nods. “People talked. Said they used to be Jedi.”

_“Ben, no—!”_

_A temple burns, flames and smoke curling high into the indigo night._

Rey squeezes her eyes shut. 

“And get this,” comes Finn’s voice again, lighter now. “All they wear is black.”

Rey forces a smile. 

Silence again. The wind picks up, and the trees bend beneath its force. “Rey, I know there’s something… _new_ in you,” Finn says at last. “Different. Special. I can’t understand your power. But I don’t have to. I don’t want to. I just want you to feel comfortable _talking_ to me again. You’re the first real friend I’ve ever had — stars, the best friend I’ve ever had. You know that, right?”

She allows herself the luxury of a smile, real this time, and sits beside him, taking his hand. “Of course I do. And you’re mine.” He is, he always will be, and there’s so much she wants to tell him. “When I was on the island,” she begins, slowly, tentatively, “I learned. So much. Not just from Luke, about the ways of the Force. Finn, I learned the truth about my parents.”

His eyes widen. “No,” he breathes, his voice low and disbelieving, and Rey knits her brow again. “Oh, no… Han and Leia were your parents. You’re his sister.”

Rey chokes out a short, low sound, almost like a laugh. But she’d considered it once. More than once. When she’d piloted the _Falcon_ with Han and whispered _Rey Solo_ to herself over and over in her bunk, until she’d fallen asleep and dreamt in shifting visions of the family she never had. And Leia had always looked at her in a curious, wondering way, as if there were something deeply familiar hidden away beneath her desert-hardened shell. Even when the bond had first roared to life, and she’d felt him in the fibers of her being, she’d wanted to believe theirs was a connection akin to Luke and Leia’s. It was the simplest explanation, after all, and by far the easiest to stomach.

“No,” she says now, squeezing Finn’s hand. “No, no, it’s not that. They were nobody. Junk-traders on Jakku.… And terrible people, too. They sold me off for drinking money.”

Finn’s face falls, and Rey swallows a sigh. He’d wanted it too, then: the perfect story, the simple answer to the vast complexity of the universe’s mysteries. They’ve both been denied it now. “I’m sorry, Finn,” she says. “I just feel so… lost. Like I don’t know my place in this story, and never will.”

“Hey,” he says gently, as tears bead in her eyes, “what are you talking about? Your place is with us! You’re going to help us win this war. What is it that Poe always says? ‘We are the spark that will light the fire that will burn the First Order down.’ And this — this _king_ ”—he gestures almost helplessly, as if the title alone is beyond his understanding—“he’s seen your spark. He’s heard stories about you. Legends like you and I used to hear about Luke Skywalker.”

Rey chews her lip, remembering. _I failed_. _Because I was Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master. A legend._ It had broken her heart to hear him say it, to see the great Luke Skywalker reduced to a shadow of bygone heroism. 

“You look like you were born to carry his lightsaber, you know,” Finn says. “Stars, I wish I’d been there — well, you know, _really there_ — to see you fight him. Kylo Ren. Chewie said you gave him a huge scar, right up the side of his face.”

“I did,” she answers, so softly the words barely come out at all. 

Finn moves forward and pulls her tight against his chest, his arms locked fiercely around her back. “You were so strong for us then,” he says, and his voice is warm and earnest and suffused with faith. “Be strong for us now.”

She wants to be. Stars, she wants to be. But if she closes her eyes, she can imagine Finn lying on his stomach in the snow, his spine torn open, and the violent storm of fear and rage that had flared in her heart at the sight of his attacker, dark and powerful and looming over them. 

When she had stood to face him, her fear had hardened fast into bloodlust, and she might have killed him had the earth beneath their feet not rent in two. She had never been strong like Finn. No, she had only been weak, had only turned her fear into a thing of destruction. In that way she had been no better than him.

She doesn’t know what a hero is anymore.  

 

By dusk she’s retreated to the women’s sleeping quarters, which are empty all the waking day long. The air around her is stretched taut with an unease so palpable she doesn’t need the Force to sense it. By now the whole base must know of Poe’s offer, and of her ambivalence. 

And later, when Luke Skywalker appears in her quarters again, his bluish ghost stepping out from behind a rusting bunk, her heart doesn’t jolt with surprise as it had when he’d first presented himself to her. Instead she finds herself relieved, deeply but inexplicably, at his presence. “What is it?” he asks, as if it’s the most natural question in the world. “What’s troubling you?”

“It’s Poe,” she sighs, covering her face with her hands. “There’s a — a king of some mining planet, and he’s heard of me. He wants to pledge his support to the Resistance. Because of me.”

“That’s very flattering,” Luke says obligingly.

“Because I’m strong with the Force,” she continues. “Because I’m the last Jedi.”

Luke furrows his brow. “Is it a curse to be strong with the Force?”

“Yes, of course it is,” she bites back. “You know that.” Her eyes flicker warily over his shifting, bluish form. “Or knew that.”

“It’s only a curse if you make it one,” Luke says gently.

But Rey is too deep in her thoughts. “I’m not the hero they think I am,” she cries, knitting her fingers anxiously into her tangled hair, nails digging into the sensitive skin of her scalp. “I… I was so close to betraying them! Maker, I _did_ betray them! I betray them every night, when he just… _appears! —_ and I do nothing to stop him.”

“You know,” he sighs, crossing the room to sit beside her, “I was only a humble farm boy from Tatooine when my first master found me.” Through the Force he conveys to her dim images of a desert sandscape, lit orange by a binary sunset. “He told me that a princess of Alderaan needed my help, that a fallen Jedi called Darth Vader had killed my father, that I needed to train in the ways of the Force. Do you know what I told him?”

Rey, silent, studies him warily.

“I told him that I had chores to do.”

At this she must laugh, if softly. 

“Yes, destiny came to my doorstep, and I turned it away,” Luke muses quietly. “Well, as I suppose you know, didn’t take kindly to my rejection. So I trained as a Jedi, like my father before me. For a long time — three years — I thought I would complete my training by killing Darth Vader, avenging my father, and destroying the Sith. Hell, we all thought it — Han and Leia, too. And then…”

Rey’s conscious wrinkles at the edges. _No, I_ _am your father._

“Turns out I wasn’t the hero they thought I was, either,” he says.

“That’s different,” Rey protests. “You couldn’t _control_ the fact that he was your father.”

“No,” he concedes. “But I _could_ control what I did about it. I could hope where he feared, could love where he hated.”

Rey thinks again of Darth Vader, the black soul of evil she’d imagined at Leia’s funeral. “What happened to him?” she asks tentatively, as if afraid of the answer. “How did he die?”

And Luke tells her. It’s such a familiar story — the surrender, the sleek black ship, the dread Emperor, the torture, the betrayal — that Rey finds her eyes filling with tears. Yes, of course Darth Vader had turned, she thinks, of course the soul of Anakin Skywalker had been redeemed in the light. Hadn’t she known it always? Somehow, somewhere, deep in the throbbing course of her blood?

Still it frustrates her, sets her heart to churning. “Why didn’t he turn?” she asks Luke, and they both know which _he_ she’s talking about. The _he_ Luke had nearly killed, all for a mere shadow of darkness that had shrouded his youthful mind in sleep. 

Luke takes her hand between his. It’s a funny feeling, a strange buzz of energy, and her hand twitches with the Force. “Rey,” he says gently, “you’re on the right path, and somewhere down the line is the truth. But you need to find it yourself.”

“Master Skywalker,” she pleads. “Luke. Please, no more mysteries. There’s so much I still don’t know, and so little time. My friends… they’ll die. They’ll die if I do nothing. The war will find us eventually.” He’d told her as much, when she’d gone to him aboard his ship, and first craved the intimacy of his touch. It had felt like a betrayal then, too, when she’d threaded her fingers through the black silk of his hair and called him by his name — all as he’d foretold the death of the only people she’d ever hoped to love.

Luke tilts his head. “Have I told you to do nothing?” 

“I don’t know what you’ve told me,” she protests desperately. “That’s the thing.”

Luke frowns at this, releasing her hand. “When I was training,” he begins slowly, “learning the ways of the Force as you still are, I had a premonition. I sensed that Han and Leia were in danger, and they were. They had been captured by Darth Vader. My masters thought it was a trap, and they told me to ignore it. If I abandoned my training, they said, I would never fulfill my destiny and become a Jedi strong enough to defeat Darth Vader and the Emperor.” He pauses, sighs. “But they were my friends. Yes, I had the Force, and I knew in my heart that my destiny would call me to something greater than a simple rescue mission… but they were my _friends_.”

Rey nods. “You want me to go.”

“It’s not about what _I_ want you to do,” Luke says, echoing Poe’s words from earlier. But then Poe, of course, had assigned all the agency and will to the King in Armidia, that distant would-be ally. Luke knows better, and bows his head with tender humility. “It’s about what you think is right.”

As Luke’s phantom figure fades before her eyes, Rey stands and holsters his father’s lightsaber in her belt. The walk to the mess hall feels heavy somehow, as if each step is weighed down by the gravity of its end. But the closer she draws, the lighter each step becomes, and there’s a buoyancy in her heart, too, that matches the bounding rhythm of her gait.

The hall falls silent when she enters.

“Hey, Poe,” she says, finding his eyes across the room. “I’m in.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> woooo a wild update appears!! sorry for the wait on this one, guys. but at least this one is nice and long :)
> 
> again, your comments and kudos mean the absolute world to me. please let me know what you think of this latest installment!!

It’s late, long after dinner hours, when Kylo storms into his training suite. The rooms are dimly lit, with walls of metallic black; once he’d thought them a fitting cage for his dark and wild soul. Now they’re still a cage, but their confines don’t feel quite so apt. 

At the end of the hall he hears the groan of another lightsaber and, reaching through the Force, finds Aric Ren. Anger roils through his Force signature, sets the air to throbbing with a vicious energy, and Kylo tilts his head in wondering.

“Master!” Aric says upon first sensing Kylo at the threshold. “Forgive me. I didn’t know you’d come.”

“It’s all right,” Kylo answers. “Where are the others?”

“Just gone. Should I call them back?”

“No.” Kylo drops his gaze to the lightsaber in Aric’s tightly balled fist. “Why are you still here?”

“I’ve been working on a new training regimen,” Aric says. “Better. Faster.”

Kylo crosses his arms. “Let’s see it then.”

Aric eyes him warily, then moves across the narrow space to the tech pad, where he choreographs an intricate dummy assault. When a squadron of dummies and holograms duly roars forward, Kylo watches, half in awe and half in horror, as Aric swiftly and elegantly dispatches them, lightsaber whining proudly in his hands. There’s a raw ferocity to his movement as he draws greedily, savagely, mercilessly from the Force.

Kylo is used to training with his knights. But they have always been his lessers — brothers in the field of battle, yes, but lessers in training, where Kylo’s superior will, strength, and blood win out. 

When Aric finishes, wiping the beading sweat from his brow and turning to his master, Kylo only manages: “Good.”

“Good?”

“Yes.”

“We should all be training better,” Aric says sharply. His eyes narrow, and he advances a step closer. “You know, don’t you? It’s coming. A new war.”

“The war is over,” Kylo snaps, biting the nervous edge out of his tone. “Skywalker is dead. The Resistance is destroyed.”

“Not yet. Skywalker is dead, yes, but the light is still strong in the Resistance.”

Kylo feels a twinge of panic in his chest as he traces the likely trajectory of Aric’s thoughts. “Not as strong as it once was,” he counters. It’s a mistake. 

A shadow of understanding passes over Aric’s face, tugs his lips into the first hint of a smile. “Ah,” he says. “Your mother.”

Kylo looks down, feels his veins roar with a sudden suffusion of self-loathing.

“She’s gone to the Force.”

Another incarnation of Kylo Ren would have struck Aric down for the audacity of his presumption. But this one only curls his lip and grinds his boot into the polished black floor, as if to crush his heart beneath his toe. “Yes,” he says sharply, remembering how his bones had ached and his soul had screamed, how the Force itself had shivered with his grief. 

Aric narrows his eyes. “It’s just as well. Now them great Jedi Killer has just one Jedi left to kill.”

Suddenly there is salt scratching the soles of his boots, the sun warm and fanning on his back, and across from him an aged Luke Skywalker with his father’s lightsaber. _I will not be the last Jedi._  

Like the proud fool he was, he’d spit into his uncle’s face: _I’ll destroy her!_

Snoke had taught him how to make a weapon of his anger. And how it had raged that day! How the sight of Skywalker alone had sharpened its point, weighted it with the gravity of a thousand stars. 

“Don’t flatter her,” Kylo says now, still grinding his toe into the floor, and wondering dimly if he could break it. “She’s untrained.”

“If I’m flattering anyone by calling her a Jedi, it’s you,” Aric counters. “She beat you — you, trained for years in the ways of the Force, hailed as the heir of Lord Vader. Better for _your_ sake to call her a Jedi than a filthy scavenger.”

In a sudden frenzy, Kylo works the Force to bring Aric to his knees. A thousand curses roar up his throat — _liar, traitor, how dare you?_ — but they still just before his lips. In one last flare of rage, he grinds Aric’s knees harder into the sleek tiled floor, feels the Force course richly and violently through his fingers. It had thrilled him once.

With a shudder, Kylo releases him.

“It’s true,” breathes Aric, undaunted, as he rises slowly to his feet. “What the Supreme Leader said. You have compassion for her.”

“I _am_ the Supreme Leader,” Kylo spits back, hand twitching to punish his insolence again. 

Aric’s features soften, and he raises a staying hand. “Of course, Master. I wouldn’t contest your supremacy. But _remember,_ Master. Remember the solemn vow you made to the Supreme Leader, to the dark side. You swore you wouldn’t rest until every last vestige of the Jedi Order had been destroyed.” His voice drops to a low hiss, reptilian and menacing, and he steps forward. “You swore that you would finish the great project begun by Lord Sidious and your grandfather.”

He steps back, and the gaze he levels upon his master is both humble and proud.

“I have something for you," he says. "I’ve meant to give it to you ever since we returned." The Master of the Knights of Ren had sent his liegemen to the farthest reaches of the galaxy to seek and destroy the last relics of the Jedi Order. It had kept them from the Order in its moments of greatest trial, but Kylo is glad, in retrospect, to have had her to himself. None other of his knights is worthy of the privilege, the _honor_ , of facing her. 

Aric moves now to the corner, to a black-clasped weapons chest. He withdraws a saber hilt, too distinctive to be mistaken, and passes it with great ceremony into Kylo’s upturned palms. 

His voice is low. “Skywalker’s lightsaber.”

Kylo glances down, flexes his fingers around the hilt of his uncle’s lightsaber. 

“This is the legacy of the Jedi,” Aric says. “This greed, this hubris. They thought themselves above possession, above attachment, above fear. But Skywalker would have _murdered_ his nephew rather than surrender him to the dark side.”

Kylo’s fingers tighten until the sleek leather of his gloves strains against his knuckles. Silently and solemnly, he works the Force into a narrow dance, and the hilt comes apart beneath its pressure. He draws the kyber crystal from its delicate setting and turns it roughly in his palm.

 _“Blood of the Sith, heir of Darth Vader. Such power… You will give me_ everything _.” The voice — his master’s voice — rumbles darkly and closely through the fiery dreamscape. “I have only one master,” Ben had told him once, his voice ringing even in dreams with all the pride and power of a Skywalker. “And his name is Luke Skywalker.”_

_“Foolish boy. You are destined for more than Skywalker could ever give you. He senses your power. He fears it. He is no master who would deny an apprentice his destiny.”_

_As his master’s voice grows distant and the dreamscape fades to a groggy haze of black, Ben’s ears ring with a new sound, close and devastatingly real: the whine of a lightsaber. His eyes flutter open, dimly perceiving a sickly glow of green. Half in awe, half in some sick soul-deep knowing, he turns to find his uncle looming over him, the acid glare of his lightsaber reflected hideously in his eyes._

_His master was right._

_In a crude blur of pain, Ben calls his lightsaber from his desk and ignites it._

_“Ben, no—!”_

_It’s the last time he’ll ever see his uncle’s face in the flesh; it’s afraid, just as his master had warned, and lit bluish-green in the twin lights of their crossed sabers._

A sun-red crack opens across the crystal’s jagged belly, weeps a narrow string of glowing blood down its side and onto Kylo’s glove. The heat sears a hole in the leather, burning his skin, and he grits his teeth to keep from crying out. A jolt of pain skitters up his arm, but he forces it back into the heart of the crystal, willing the soft bluish glow into burning red.

The visions come to him sharply, in vivid but fleeting flashes. Another throne room, black and windowed, one with the vast nothingness of space. A terrific downward slash of green, a mechanic cry of pain. _A son poised to strike down his father._

He tears himself out of the haze, gasps, drops the crystal. It breaks against the floor, scattering glinting shards of blue and red, and Kylo stumbles backward, hissing lowly through gritted teeth. All over his body, muscles twitch and tendons strain, and he wonders if he’ll ever escape Luke Skywalker. 

“Maker,” Aric whispers harshly. Panicked, Kylo reaches for his thoughts, finds them closed.

But just then the doors spring open to reveal General Hux, his narrow frame aligned in its signature pose: heels together, hands clasped dutifully behind his back, sternum angled to the ceiling. His beady, hawklike eyes skirt suspiciously over the scene, narrowing at the sight of the shattered crystal on the floor. 

“Supreme Leader,” he says sharply, flicking his gaze upward. “Colonel Enreld to see you in the briefing room.”

“Not now,” Kylo says harshly. 

“Colonel Enreld is in command of the battalion in Armidia, sir.”

Kylo’s lip curls. “And does he have anything of significance to report?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Hux whines, his tone growing impatient. “Perhaps you would consider attending the briefing and finding out for yourself.”

Kylo tightens the Force around Hux’s neck. “Tell Colonel Enreld,” he begins slowly, enjoying the music of the general’s choking, “that I will not see him unless this ship is under imminent threat of attack, or Armidia is in open rebellion.”

“Very — well, S-Supreme Leader,” gasps Hux, and scurries out of the room.

“It’s a wonder you haven’t broken his neck,” Aric says wryly.

“That’s enough,” Kylo spits. “A word more from you, and I’ll break yours.”

Aric scoffs. “Good night, Master,” he says lowly, harshly, and quits the room in a flash of black.

When he’s gone, Kylo feels an abrupt weakness in his knees, and his arm shoots to the wall to steady the sudden sway of his body. All at once his flesh tingles, and his muscles tense and flutter still, and his bones ache with a new, harsher pain. The Force whistles through him like a winter’s wind through a hollow cave.

A welt, reddish and hideous, is forming just below his thumb. He raises his hand to his lips, laves the burned flesh with his tongue. But the pain stings sharper still.

Without warning, his ears start to ring, and the Force shudders tellingly. He panics. She can’t see him like this, broken and crippled like a pathetic child. But to his horror, the Force does not bend to his will, and he struggles vainly against the sudden onslaught of the bond. 

At the sight of her, his breath catches, and he wishes he were stronger. 

“Stupid,” she hisses to herself as she yanks a wire out of some power grid. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” Twin red suns heat on her cheeks, and her nose scrunches in pointed concentration. Even now, in this fit of mundane frustration, she transfixes him. _I’ll destroy her_.

The storm in her face calms at the first hint of his presence. “Not _now_ ,” she mumbles lowly. There’s an edge to her tone; he recalls with sudden longing the tenderness of their last meeting, and wonders whether she can feel the raw fitfulness of his distemper — or whether some other, more sinister agent has turned her against him again. 

“It’s not me this time,” he returns. “I didn’t… initiate.”

When she turns her eyes up to his, he hardly recognizes them. There are hints of what he’s seen before, the fear and anger and hope and wonder he’s come to know as echoes of his own soul, but it’s a strange and foreign amalgam of feeling that churns in her green irises now. “Don’t lie,” she says coolly. “You’re not very good at it.”

“I’m not lying.” 

She stands, her body unfolding gracefully from its crouch. “Then explain why you’re here. You, who know so much of the Force. You, who would have taught me.” There’s a note of mocking to her tone, hard and untempered.

“I don’t _know_ ,” he snaps back. Her anger is entirely her own, he realizes. “I told you.”

“Well,” she says, crouching again, returning to her work. He cranes his neck and squints, willing the Force to show him more of her surroundings. “It’s a good thing you didn’t teach me, then.”

“Oh,” he says, feeling his face heat, “did Skywalker have all the answers?” 

Now she rocks back, resting her forearms on her knees. The wrench glints in her hand, and slowly, her lips curl into a scowl. “ _Don’t._ ” 

“No, really,” he presses, moving closer. Beneath his feet, the floor shifts and blurs, half polished black and half grated metal. A distant curiosity sings in the reaches of his mind, and he wonders where she is. “What did Skywalker teach you of the Force? Of our bond? Did he sit you down and explain it to you rationally? _No_. He feared it. Yes, the great Luke Skywalker — he was _afraid_.”

By now she’s turned away from him again, and there are tears beading in her eyes as she sets her attention again on the tangle of wires that’s troubling her. He studies her: studies the path her tears track down her reddened cheeks, the wisps of hair curling away from her face. As she jerks another wire out of the grid, the bond ripples with her frustration, and the sear of emotion cools to reveal more of her surroundings. Kylo’s stomach sinks.

She’s on the _Falcon,_ just as he feared, and crouched before an all too familiar panel of wires.

He remembers it. It’s one of the first things he remembers at all, really. He couldn’t have been more than three, four when, en route to Bespin, Uncle Lando’s hologram had fizzled and his father had muttered a low curse, echoing Chewie’s roar of frustration.  

_Han sighs, throws off his headset. “Alright, come on, kid,” he says, standing and taking Ben by the shoulder. “Damned holoscan modulator’s acting up again,” he grumbles. “Happens a lot. But no matter how many times it does, remember — she’s a fine ship. And she’ll be yours someday, so you might as well learn how to take care of her.”_

“Holoscan modulator,” he breathes lowly, as his father’s voice echoes in his head. “Acting up again, is it?”

She scoffs. “I’ve got it, thanks.”

“It’s my father’s ship; I think I know how to—”

At this her skin flushes a brilliant shade of pink. “Yes, it belonged to your father once,” she snaps, throwing a wrench at him. “Before you _murdered_ him.”

He dodges her missile, narrows his eyes. “We’re going to do this again, are we?”

“It won’t go away,” she says. “The past doesn’t just _die_. It has a way of sticking around.”

The words are daggers, and he winces as if they had cut his skin, made him bleed under her hungry, watchful gaze. He thinks of the forest.

But she won’t win again, not now. “Let me help you,” he says, suffused anew with resolve, and moves closer. “I know how to fix it.”

“I don’t _need_ your help,” she hisses back. 

“Actually,” he counters, wresting the wrench from her hand, “looks like you do.”

A rumble of indignation sounds through the bond. “Give that _back._ ”

But he swings it high out of her grasp. She’s a small creature, but plucky and fierce, and he almost laughs at the sight of her desperate reaching. 

Suddenly she latches onto his wrist, yanking it down, and he loses his footing. One arm reaches out to break his fall, straight and braced against the wall. She’s pinned beneath him, eyes wide and teeth clenched, and she hisses sharply, “Ben!”

They both still. Her face softens, and he feels through the bond a tender regret at this regression to intimacy. But his mind is clouded, his breaths still coming heavy and fast, as he savors another intimacy: the sudden, impossible closeness of their bodies. Through this miracle of the Force he feels the swift rhythm of her breathing, the pounding of her blood. 

He imagines dipping his head to kiss the beading sweat from her neck.

It’s relief and victory and defeat all at once when he steps back and says lowly, “That’s not my name.”

Flustered, chest and neck stained with a terrific blush, she balls her hands to fists at her sides, opening and closing her mouth several times before at last deciding on a course of speech. “Who do you think I’m talking to when I call you Ben? Hmm?” Her eyebrows arch challengingly, and through the bond he feels her. He expects a hot flash of anger, a sharp sear of the rage he’s long felt roiling beneath her thin veil of Jedi heroism. But instead he feels in her chest, and in his too, only the dull ache of disappointment. “Yes, I’m talking to Han Solo’s son,” she continues, her voice scraping just above a whisper. “Yes, I’m talking to Luke Skywalker’s apprentice. But I’m talking to Han Solo’s murderer, too. To the man who betrayed Luke and set out to destroy the Jedi.” The expression she wears now reminds him of the interrogation room: the harsh furrow of her brow, the sweat beading at her hairline from the exertion of probing his mind. “Yes,” she hums, “it’s easy to call yourself Kylo Ren. To keep spinning new identities. _That’s_ why you hate the name Ben Solo so much — it’s _you_. You, made and shaped by your past. But that’s too hard for you, isn’t it, facing the truth of the past? You just want to run. You’re a coward, Kylo Ren.”

It burns like acid. Like the truth. 

And before he can even think to respond, even begin to piece together some semblance of a defense, a familiar voice sounds from around the bend. “Rey?” it yells, worried. “Where are you?”

“That’s it, then,” she mutters, and he thinks he hears relief in her voice. 

“Dameron,” he says, remembering, his mind a heated blur. “The pilot.”

A scowl contorts her fine features. “Best in the Resistance,” she spits back.

The bond slams shut, and he recoils, jaw clenched in frustration.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tHE RESOLUTION OF THE TENSION IS COMING, have patience!
> 
> come say hi on tumblr!! @beautyandtheren :)


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY I'M SO SORRY THIS IS SO OVERDUE!!! it's also very plot-heavy but it's LONG! so enjoy. and as always, let me know your thoughts!

“Heard some noise back here,” Poe says, ducking his head and eyeing her warily. “Everything ok?”

“Yeah,” Rey answers, gulping down her shame.

“Listen, did you get the modulator up and running again? We’re about to break Armidian airspace. I’m waiting on a comm from the king.”

“Uh, no,” she says, suddenly flustered.“Sorry. I’ll get back to it.” 

But Poe lingers, his foot tapping a sharp and choppy rhythm on the floor.

Rey’s fingers still against the knotted wires, and she turns her head to study him.  “You’re nervous.”

“What, me? Nervous?” Poe looks up, eyes wide. A shadow of understanding passes over his face as he remembers: she is strong with the Force, senses things others cannot. Though she hardly needs the Force to read the anxiety writ plain in the lines of his face. “I mean, yeah, fine,” he mumbles. “I’m a little outside my comfort zone here.”

Rey smiles. “Me, too.”

“Leia,” he begins with a heavy sigh, sitting at the edge of the rounded couch, “liked to tell me that not every problem can be solved by jumping in an X-wing and blowing something up.”

“And now you’re starting to figure out what she meant?”

He sighs. “Exactly.”

Rey envies him. “You knew her so well,” she whispers quietly. “I didn’t. I should have.”

This is another problem that Poe can’t solve with an X-wing, and his eyebrows twist together in uncertainty. “Think,” he says at last, slowly, as if the words are still forming in his mind as he speaks them, “of all the people who didn’t get to know her at all. You could’ve been one of those people. If I hadn’t left BB-8 on Jakku.”

“You’re right,” she says, half-laughing. For once her mind fills with a fond memory of Jakku: a dusty pink sunset, a BB-unit with more of a personality than some — maybe most — of the junk traders she’d met at Niima Outpost. “I guess it was you who dragged me into all this.”  

“I don’t know. I think the Resistance would have found you still. Somehow.” The gleam in his eyes unsettles her; it’s bright and sharp and curious, as if she is some rare bird entrusted to his care.

It’s true, she thinks, that she couldn’t have wasted away on Jakku forever. Something — somebody — would have found her eventually. There is a beacon in her soul, after all, that even now calls across the stars for its mate.

Rey’s heart sinks, and she wishes she had told Leia. Stars, she wishes a thousand things. 

Poe seems unnerved by her silence. He jerks his head up awkwardly, glances behind her shoulder. “Do you need help with the holo mod?”

She shakes her head as if to clear it of fog. “No, I’ve got it.” With a steeling sigh, she returns to her work. But something shifts in her understanding, and her eyes see the wire grid before them as if through a new lens — as if through the eyes of another. Her fingers move of their own accord, re-configuring the grid in the fleeting space of a moment. “That should do it,” she tells Poe, and sits back on her knees, her mind an echoing blur. 

“Fantastic. Thanks a ton, Rey.”

As he turns away, returning to the cockpit, Rey chews her lip nervously. Would Poe have been able to see him, as Luke had? To see her body pinned beneath his, their breaths heaving in unison, their faces just inches apart and blood-hot _something_ sparking between them? With a solemn, visceral dread she remembers how Poe’s eyes had gleamed at the thought of defeating Kylo Ren. But he is not Poe’s. Nor Finn’s, nor anyone’s but hers. Hers to have, to save, to bring to his knees.   

A familiar voice sounds from the cockpit: “General Dameron. This is Armidia. Do you copy?”

Poe’s answers immediately, excitedly. “Yes, sir. This is Dameron.”

Rey scrambles back into the cockpit to see the king’s hologram projected just above the console. It’s magnificent as ever, and exotically beautiful, and she’s reminded of how little she’s seen of the galaxy. “I assume,” the king drawls, with a hint of a smile, “that you’ll be flying in on Captain Solo’s starship.”

Poe lifts his eyebrows. “We’ll be on the _Falcon,_ yes.”

“I’ve opened an underground hangar north of the palace. It’s best that you park there. The area around the capital is crawling with stormtroopers, and I imagine they’d recognize the _Millennium Falcon_. It follows, of course, that you should avoid approaching from the city. There’s a storm moving in from the mountains. It should provide you ample cover.”

“Roger that, sir.”

The _Falcon_ is too clumsy a ship for Poe’s nimble hands, and the drop into Armidian airspace is rude and abrupt. It turns Rey’s stomach. “Stars,” she gasps, shoving Poe out of the captain’s chair. Chewie howls in appreciation. “You should really stick to piloting fighters, you know.”

“Hey!” he protests, his tone clipped. “It’s not my fault this piece of junk’s all we have left.”

Rey gasps, offended. “You watch your tongue. She made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.”

Chewie gives a delighted roar.

When the _Falcon_ breaks the clouds, skimming over the jagged Armidian landscape, Rey leans across the console and nearly presses her nose to the rain-streaked windows. It’s a magnificent thing, this new world of jagged mountains and sloping valleys, and all at once she is a child again, eyes wide and lungs swollen with wonder. The land is rough yet elegant, riddled all over with young upward flares of mountain rock, and striped with winding streams. If she squints, she can see proud, magnificently horned animals roaming in herds over the green- and brown-patched earth. 

“It’s beautiful,” she whispers.

“Yeah,” Poe says, lunging forward to steady her hands, “and you’re gonna fly us straight into one of these mountains if you don’t pay attention.”

Rey bats his hand away. “I think I can handle myself, _thank you very much_.”

Chased by thunder and streaked all over with rain, the _Falcon_ soars between and through the jagged Armidian mountains. Rey navigates easily to the underground hangar whose coordinates the king had given them, and as the metal doors groan open and she parks the ship inside, she feels her heart race with dread and excitement at once. 

The ramp lowers to reveal an Armidian guard, dressed in a crisp white uniform with silver-threaded epaulettes. Chewie takes one look at him and shakes his head, insisting that someone remain on the ship to keep it safe from spies. 

Rey laughs. “Spies?”

“He’s right,” Poe mutters lowly. “We’ve got to be careful here.”

Rey hardly has a chance to register his words before they’re descending the ramp and greeting the handsomely uniformed guard, whose blue skin is stretched taut across high, striking cheekbones and an elegant nose. “General Dameron,” he says with a short bow. “Mistress Rey. General Marlaar Aaron of the King’s Guard, at your service.” Another bow, and Rey’s stomach flips at the stilted formality of his address. “Welcome to Armidia. The king requests an audience with you immediately.” 

“Fantastic,” Poe responds curtly. “Let’s get to work.”

Rey swallows, still uneasy at having been styled “Mistress Rey,” and follows Captain Aaron and Poe through the winding tangle of tunnels that leads from the hangar to the palace. The underground air is chill and damp, and even now, six months out from Jakku, her cooling skin almost sings with gratitude.

When they emerge into the palace complex, the mossy stone walls turn to glass and sleek white marble. Captain Aaron leads them up a towering flight of stairs and at last into the main body of the palace. Rey can’t help the gasp that flutters up her throat. Above her arch high, vaulted ceilings. The rain spills in mesmerizing cascades down the paneled glass windows. It’s stark and bright and impossibly clean, and she raises her hands to study them, suddenly conscious of her filth. A cleaning droid bustles along behind her, wiping the sleek floor clean of her dusty footprints.

“The throne room is this way,” says the captain, turning sharply down a narrow corridor. 

Almost shamefully, Rey remembers another throne room. This one, however, is bright where the other was dark, washed in grey sunlight where the other seemed somehow subterranean, the dark and smoking pit of the underworld.     

Captain Aaron enters before them, drawing a sword from its sheath at his hip and twirling it in some elaborate ceremonial dance. Then he kneels, sword planted sharply before his toe, and says: “Your Highness. I have delivered to your presence General Poe Dameron of the Galactic Resistance, and the Jedi knight Rey of Jakku.”

Rey and Poe move cautiously through the opened doors. The king luxuriates in majesty on his throne, arrayed in magnificent robes of silver thread. His snow-white hair falls freely over his shoulders, undone except for two braids knotted above his ears, and his fair blue skin is painted around the eyes. The throne is flanked by two guards in ceremonial dress, swords sheathed at their sides, eyes unblinking.   

“General Dameron,” says the king, standing from his throne and holding out his arms in greeting. “You are well met, sir. And the lady, too.”

Rey stiffens.

“Your Highness,” says Poe, dropping to one knee. Rey follows.

But as she bows her head, her ears begin to ring, and something tender pulls in her chest. The world around her blurs into a wash of white and gray. The Force hums dark and hot around her, sparking with the insistence of his will. 

 _No,_ she presses, half panicked, into the gathering storm.

 _Stop it,_ he presses back, harder. _Stop trying to push me out. You called me a_ coward _and won’t even let me defend myself—_

 _You_ are _a coward,_ she responds, in spite of herself.

_Let me prove you wrong._

_I’m not doing this. Not now._

_Now you’re the one who’s running._

The bond strains under the force of her will. It’s so much stronger now, harder to close at a moment’s notice. But she grits her teeth and reaches into the dark space between them, snuffs out the stars one by one, shakes down a thunder of nothingness from the wide swath of dust and dark matter. The last she hears from him is a shuddering sigh, a sharp cry of “No!” Then an iron curtain of silence, cold and empty.

When she looks up, blinking to register again her surroundings, the throne room is utterly still. 

Poe’s gaze burns on her face, but she looks only to the king, who watches her in awe. 

“Mistress Rey,” he says, leaning forward, “are you well?”

She tilts her chin, flustered. “Yes, Your Highness.”

“This must be some mystery of the Force,” he muses quietly. “There are many legends about you, you know. About your uncanny strength in the Force.”

Rey shifts uneasily. She almost asks after the legends; they’d have more to say than Luke ever did on the subject of her sudden power.  

“Is it true you wield Skywalker’s lightsaber?”

Rey unfastens the saber from her belt and extends it toward the king. “Yes, Your Highness,” she says. “I found it on Takodona, and when Master Skywalker refused to take it back on Ahch-To, I kept it for myself.”

The king tilts his head, considering her. “It is said you are his daughter.”

“I’m not,” she says, and fights the urge to hang her head. She and Finn hadn’t been alone, then, in seeking to resolve the mystery of her power in the heroes of a bygone rebellion.

“Well, Skywalker or no, you are a Jedi. The last of your kind.”

Rey thinks dimly of seven others, seven Jedi padawans who trained under Luke when she only a child, abandoned and starving on Jakku. They were fed and nourished and loved, and still they turned. 

 _Loved?_ scoffs the dark whisper buried in the reaches of her conscious. _Was it love that lit Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber over his sleeping nephew?_

“I haven’t trained long enough to truly call myself a Jedi,” Rey says now, biting the quiver out of her voice. “It’s only been months.”

“You trained under Luke Skywalker. That is enough to me, and to the galaxy.” His ice-blue eyes soften as if melting, and he says quietly, “I hope you will allow me an audience later this evening. There is much I wish to discuss with you.”

Rey bows her head, overwhelmed with the newness and the mystery of it all. “Of course, Your Highness.”  
“Now, General Dameron,” he resumes, his voice hardening into a clear, authoritative thunder. “I invited you here to discuss the terms of an alliance.”

“The Resistance is very grateful to you, sir.”

“We’ve been compulsorily demilitarized under the First Order,” says the king warily. “We cannot supply you with arms. Our assistance will be largely financial.” He tilts his head to the side to hear the counsel of an advisor beside him. “I hope you will forgive my frankness, General — but the Crown can offer you a loan of two million credits.”

“A — two million credits?” Poe sputters, disbelieving.

“Any outstanding debt at the close of the war will be absorbed by the Senate.”

Rey’s heart sings at the thought. To a poor orphan on Jakku, the Senate had been little more than a distant dream. But it seems so much realer now, a dream to be effected and not just dreamed.  

“The Senate,” Poe repeats dumbly.

“I’d be happy to continue negotiations over the coming days,” the king continues. “But I would advise caution. I believe the Supreme Leader sensed how reluctantly I accepted his rule, and he has since kept my kingdom under tight surveillance. For this reason, I have invited you here under the cover of a significant trade delegation from Christophsis. The stormtrooper battalion stationed here has been told to expect an influx of new faces.”

“Thank you, Your Highness.” Poe’s voice is so breathless with gratitude that Rey can’t help but look at him. There is something very raw and very real in the way his shoulders are slumped, his confident bravado all melted away to reveal a core of passionate dreams at last met with reality.   

“Captain Aaron will show you to your rooms,” the king says, nodding shallowly to acknowledge Poe’s thanks. “I’ve stocked your wardrobes with Christophsian dress — just in case. And Mistress Rey — in five hours, perhaps you could meet me on the south colonnade?”

“Yes, Your Highness,” she answers. “If only you would be so good as to call me Rey — just Rey.” 

\--

Kylo is troubled to think of her on the _Falcon,_ troubled still more to think of her with Dameron, who must have succeeded his mother as the commanding general of the Resistance. They must be moving — though whether to another remote hideout, or to meet with a potential ally, he cannot know. _You could know,_ sounds a dark, insistent voice from the shadowed corners of his mind: the pits of fear and hatred from which he’d drawn the power to terrify her and thousands of others. _The entire galaxy is yours. They are powerless — she is powerless — to hide from you._

But he thinks of her body, sweat-painted and heaving, pinned beneath his. He thinks of the strange _something_ that had sparked and glowed and hummed between them, as alive as either of their bodies, and shot through with the Force. At last, and all too late, he begins to understand why the Jedi had so vehemently foresworn attachment.  

The next day, Kylo convenes the Knights of Ren in council, conspicuously declining to invite the ranking officers of the First Order. The sight of Hux alone is enough to make his whole being quake in anger, but hate the general though he does, Kylo Ren is no fool. He cannot afford to alienate his military. 

Nor, he knows, can he afford to alienate his knights. He’s felt the doubt that twists Aric’s stomach, the doubt he’s shared with his brothers, the doubt that, left to fester, will spell his downfall. 

They file in slowly. Kylo is standing at the viewport, his back to the council table, when he hears the last of the knights take his seat. “Master, will you join us?” comes the voice of Magnus Ren.

Kylo turns. “Of course. There’s much to discuss.”

But when he moves to sit, he finds the table full. 

“No,” Kylo whispers lowly, stumbling backward until his palms press against the cool glass of the viewport. “Get out.”

“Ben,” says his uncle’s ghost, his tone chastising in the Force. “I’ve come here for a reason.”

“Master?” sounds a distant voice.

“Who summoned him?” Kylo hisses, wishing he could back still further away, shatter the viewport and drift into the black void of space. “You mean to test me, then?” 

“Master, what’s wrong?”

“Stand up,” Aric barks. “The Supreme Leader is not well.”

Kylo squints at his uncle’s ghost. “You,” he says, his lip curling in anger. “You would dare to show your face here?” His whole body heats as he draws his lightsaber, ignites it.

“Put that away, Ben,” Skywalker chides.

“Stop calling me that!” 

The ghost’s eyes narrow. “I’ll call you by the name your mother gave you.”

This is an affront he cannot bide. “How _dare_ you,” he spits out, the words seeped through with contempt, dark and slick like a snake. The thought of his mother churns his stomach. _Force_ , more than that, it’s enough to wrest his heart from his chest, still pulsing and leaking the last of his lifeblood, and cast it to the dogs. 

He wants to hate her for leaving him. He wonders if anyone will ever stay.

Skywalker rises, as if in answer. What irony, Kylo reflects bitterly, that it should be his uncle who stays, who haunts him, who refuses to leave him to suffer alone and in silence. That even now, from beyond the grave, Skywalker should deny him peace. 

Kylo bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood. 

“Ben,” he says now, his ghostly figure moving closer. “Don’t run away from me. You can’t run forever. You’ll just end up at the galaxy’s edge, with nothing in front of you and everything behind you.”

“Get back,” Kylo snarls, leveling the blade of his saber at his uncle’s throat.

Aric grabs him roughly, suddenly, by the shoulders. “Master!” he growls, as Kylo lowers the lightsaber in a daze. “Are you one of us? A knight of Ren?”  
“Yes, and the bravest, who would look on _that face_!” Kylo jabs a finger toward his uncle, who only shakes his head. 

Aric looks but does not see. “This is the very _painting_ of your fear!” he hisses lowly. “For shame, Master!”

“Yes, for shame,” Skywalker says knowingly. “She was right about you.”     

A shot of rage arrows through him, and Kylo struggles against Aric’s grip. “She doesn’t know me.”

“No. She knows you better than you know yourself.”

“How _dare_ you—”

But Skywalker only bows his head and fades into the ether: a mirror of his last moments on Crait. Even now, as then, Kylo finds himself whispering, “No.”

His eyes fall to his lightsaber, still ignited and crackling, and he remembers, with a sudden jolt of pain, how easily it had sliced through his father’s stomach. 

\--

The south colonnade, where the king had requested to meet with his Jedi guest, faces away from the city, toward the foothills of the Karlavian range, which Rey had lately learned was named for the first King of Armidia. He was the King _of_ Armidia then, when it was still an independent planet, free from the authority of some distant Empire or Order. 

The present king comes to her now, all silver and blue in the moonlight, as if he were some god of the celestial heavens. The species on Jakku she encountered on Jakku were ugly creatures, hulking and rude and coarse, and beauty had seemed, like so many other things, a distant dream. Here and now it surrounds her, casts the moon-shaded mountains and the velvet, star-spangled sky and the blue-skinned hosts who fete her — her, a scavenger — in silvery hues of charm and grace.   

“Rey,” says the king, kind enough to honor her request from earlier. “I am glad you have come.”

Rey dips her head. “Your Highness.”      

“I was anxious to see who should succeed General Organa,” he muses, beginning to stroll along the length of the colonnade. “She was such a presence, such a power. But you and General Dameron have done well in her absence.”   

“How did you know her?” Rey asks.

The king smiles fondly. “I was fifteen years old when the Rebels destroyed the first Death Star. The legends spread quickly. They said the Rebellion owed its victory to a farmboy from Tatooine, a Corellian smuggler, and a princess of Alderaan. Imagine my wonder.” Now he laughs, and his eyes glint with remembering. “It wasn’t long before I saw images of the princess on the holonet. I even thought myself in love with her once. But soon after the death of the Emperor and the restoration of the Republic, of course, she married Captain Solo. I bore him no ill will, I promise you!”

Rey forces a smile, but memory for her is not such a happy and tender thing.

“It was custom then,” the king continues. “That the heir to the throne serve in the Senate. I met her there, and we became very close.” He pauses, Rey following suit beside him, and a shadow falls over his face. “When she delivered of her first child, I sent the boy a gift. Terrible thing, what happened to him.”  
There’s something soft and avuncular in his tone, and Rey, anxious to relieve at least something of her burden, finds herself reflecting quietly, “Leia wanted so badly to believe that there was still light in him. I did too. But I don’t know if I can anymore.”

The king pauses, turns to her with wide and wondering eyes. “What do you mean?”

Rey stills. “The boy—” she begins haltingly. “Leia’s son—”

“Died in the sack of Skywalker’s academy.”

“Yes,” Rey says hotly, as if swearing allegiance to this new truth. Shame and foreboding and fear overtake her all at once, swirl into a maelstrom of emotion that pulses against the walls of her chest.  

“What did he tell you of that night?” the king asks.

She recovers. “Nothing at all. My time with him was very short… and he didn’t say much.” This much, at least, is true. The rest, she fears, is not her truth to tell. 

“I had many reasons for summoning you and General Dameron here, you know.” He sighs, leans against the railing, studies the distant mountains with pensive, narrowed eyes. “Of course I wished to pledge my support to the Resistance. But there’s something else — some _one_ else.”

Rey bristles. There’s something almost foreboding in his tone.

“It’s my daughter,” he says at last, pausing before a pair of marble-paneled doors, throwing them open to reveal a shadowy bedroom, dark and striped in moonlight. On the floor sits a child in a nightgown, her hair let down from its braids and cascading like liquid silver around her shoulders. Rey watches in awe as the girl’s fingers move in familiar twitches over a scattered array of toys, lifting them in little bursts of effort from the floor. Almost unnecessarily, the king supplies: “She is strong with the Force.”

The child looks up, and Rey is startled to feel how mightily the Force storms within her, churning and roiling like the seas of Ahch-To. It’s raw and savage and untamed, and it reminds her of another.  

“Adyara,” says the king. “This is Rey."

The child stands and moves toward them, brimming even in her youth with the unhurried elegance of her father. “Mistress Rey,” she says, in wondering accents. Her blue eyes search Rey’s face. “My father has told me about you. About the Jedi. Is it true you knew Luke Skywalker?”

“I knew him, yes.”

“I have heard tell of him. He was a hero. Some say he was a god.”

Rey smiles, not altogether happily, and kneels so that her face is opposite the girl’s. “He was a great man,” she says. “A very brave man. But he wasn’t perfect.” Her mind fills with a wash of acid green, and her chin falls somewhat, as if tugged down by the ache of memory. “And neither am I. The Jedi aren’t gods.”

“Surely not,” says the king. “But they are the galaxy’s last hope against the rising evil of Kylo Ren. Rey, I must ask you to train my daughter to be sensitive of the light side of the Force. Train her as a Jedi. Induct her into the new order that will destroy the dark side once and for all.”

Rey nearly protests that the dark side cannot be destroyed, that it is as much a part of the Force as the light, that balance is just that: balance, not destruction and conquest. But these are mysteries and insights better imparted to his daughter. So she tilts up her chin, offers the king a small smile of gratitude, and answers, “I would be happy to, Your Highness.”   

The guest quarters to which she returns that night are appointed with a thousand luxuries. A shower, for once, and not cold and spitting like on the rebel base on Arbra, but warm and lush, the water unfolding thickly over her body like a summer’s rain. Stepping out of the fresher, she slips into the green nightgown hung in the wardrobe, sighs with delight as the silk flutters over her clean skin.  

A strange, prickling curiosity overtakes her at the sight of a mirror in the corner, and she sits before it, blinking dumbly at her reflection. The face that stares back at her is soft, not hardened by desert wastes and cruelty and hunger. Its cheeks are flushed pink, its eyes glossy green, its skin soft and damp and glowing. It’s almost _pretty_. 

The green silk of the nightdress does something to bring out the green in her eyes, and the effect is altogether strange, captivating. It is a woman that stares back at her from the mirror, a woman whose grace is not to her detriment, but to her strength. 

Even now, alone and finally in private, she wishes to be seen. 

“Rey.”

She whirls around to find Poe on the threshold, and her traitorous heart sinks in disappointment.

“What did the king want?” he asks, advancing a step, now two, into the room.

Rey pulls her still-damp hair back from her face, ties it into a knot at the nape of her neck. “His daughter has the Force,” she says matter-of-factly, almost dismissively. For once she wishes for solitude, and resents Poe’s intrusion. “He wants me to train her.”

“Are you going to?”

“I’m going to try.”

“Good. We want to make sure he has as many reasons as possible to stay with us. We’re not as… I don’t know… _seductive_ as the First Order.” 

Rey has to turn her head away to hide her blush.

“Anyway,” he says with a huff. “I’ll let you get some sleep.” Out of the corner of her eye she watches him turn to leave.

“Wait,” she says suddenly, remembering. “Poe, is it not common knowledge that… Kylo Ren is Leia’s son?”

His eyes darken. “No. Not at all.”

“Then how do you know? You said — in that meeting a few weeks ago — that he was the last Skywalker.”

Poe raises a hand to scratch distractedly at the back of his neck. “Leia told me.”

Rey wonders what else Leia had told him. 

“She would have torched me if she’d seen me blurt it out like that,” he mutters. “Big mistake. Rose came up to me later crying her eyes out. It’s not the kind of thing that people like to hear.” His eyes narrow. “Did you tell the king?”

“No!” she gasps, throwing up her hands in a gesture of innocence. “He brought it up.”

“And you said?”

“Nothing.”

Poe eyes her warily. “Did something… happen between you and him?”

“The king and I?”

“No.” His tone hardens, and he presses: “You and Kylo Ren.”

“We fought,” she answers, lacing her words with a sharpness to match his. “On Starkiller Base. And I won. That’s what happened between Kylo Ren and me.”

Poe shifts his jaw, his eyes flitting warily across her face. “Okay. Let’s hope that happens again. And soon.”

The dread returns to pull at the pit of her stomach. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know the drill: come say hello on @beautyandtheren over at tumblr :)
> 
> p.s. if you picked up on the (explicit) macbeth vibes, let's be friends.


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